Posted on 02/04/2024 9:54:11 AM PST by Kaiser8408a
The great Will Rogers once said he never met a man he didn’t like. US President Joe Biden and Democrats have never met a spending opportunity they didn’t like (except for US border security, of course).
Under “Deficit Joe” Biden, Federal budget deficits have soared! And deficits are projected to grow!
Over the past year, we have been closely watching the staggering acceleration in the growth of both US debt (the chart below which is just one month old is already woefully outdated, as total US debt just hit $34.191 trillion on the first day of February)…
… and global debt.
The problem, as Apollo’s gloomy chief strategist Torsten Slok points out, is that this feverish pace will only accelerate further, as a record $8.9 trillion of government debt will mature over the next year.
Meanwhile, the government budget deficit in 2024 will be $1.4 trillion according to the CBO (realistically expect this number to hit $2.0 trillion), and the Fed has been running down its balance sheet by $60 billion per month.
The bottom line is that someone will need to buy more than $10 trillion in US government bonds in 2024. That is more than one-third of US government debt outstanding. And more than one-third of US GDP.
More fundamentally, Slok muses, “interest rate-sensitive balance sheets such as households, pension, and insurance have been the biggest buyers of Treasuries in 2023, and the question is whether they will continue to buy once the Fed starts cutting rates.”
(Spoiler alert: no… but that’s what QE is for, and sooner or later, it’s coming back).
Apollo’s latest updated outlook on Treasury demand is below (pdf link).
And don’t forget about $212.5 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities (Social Security, Medicare, etc).
(Excerpt) Read more at confoundedinterest.net ...
You realize that this "problem" has only one solution, correct?
Read your Bible. Study history.
Private ownership of debt and using debt as money ends the same way, every time.
At this point anyone who buys US government debt is like a bartender plying the town drunk with alcohol right before the drunk drives past a grade school. Children and the next generations are innocent of this debt and should not be forced to repay it. Screw the bartender who is actually funding the problem.
Inflate, inflate, inflate!
In 5 years, we’ll all be trillionaires.
And penniless at the same time.
We are at 3.7% unemployment, and just added 350,000+ jobs. Yet, we are running > $1 TRILLION in annual deficit spending. If you cannot be running a surplus with these supposed economic stats, we never will.
I have an alternate theory. The deficit spending is the only thing propping up the economy. We would otherwise have negative GDP and be in a deep recession. This is as deliberate a move by the Dems as the open border policies.
The Dems will be happy to hand the keys over to Trump by the time January 2025 arrives, so they can blame the coming calamity on him.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.