Falling of a Cliff: the $34 Trillion Elephant in the Room is Too Big to be Ignored
While the US government keeps playing games, the world is actively preparing for an economic crisis; and we should too
The US national debt is quickly approaching $35 trillion, and there is no end in sight to the reckless spending. Since June 2023, the US debt has been rising by $1 trillion every 100 days.
Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the International Monetary Fund (an entity that has been a product of US economic and foreign policy since it was founded in 1944 via the Bretton Woods), finally admitted that the exponentially increasing interest expense on national debt is “mind boggling”.
It is clear that things must be on the verge of a massive collapse when even the IMF starts to admit the obvious. On Monday, May 6th, Georgieva appeared at the Milken Institute Global Conference, where she said:
“It cannot go like this forever, because the ... burden on the U.S. is going to cripple spending that is necessary to make for servicing the debt. To pay 17-plus percent in debt service is just mind-boggling. There is opportunity cost to this money, it doesn’t go to emerging markets where it can finance jobs and business opportunities for American companies.”
The head of the IMF added that she expects “policymakers to take a course correction when they see that where they are headed is, you know, falling off a cliff”.
There is no denying the fact that surging national debt puts an immense burden on future generations whose standard of living will gradually decline as the US government is unable to afford the same level of social investments than it once made with ease. The bad news for those of us who might not care about the future generations’ wellbeing is that reckless spending has already affected us: look around and you will notice the aging infrastructure, increasing poverty, social division unseen in decades, increasing crime rates across the country and so on.
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