President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Yup. And regardless of whether you follow along with me, you should be thinking about this. It took the U.S. about 180 years to accumulate $1 trillion in debt. That was in 1982, when Reagan cut taxes and went on a spending binge. It took only another 27 years or so to get from $1 trillion to $10 trillion. Essentially the Greenspan regime, in which he did the bidding of politicians to create false economic booms to fuel their popularity (with the dot-com boom being the most memorable consequence of the debt mania it led to, as well as the mortgage / housing crisis). The $10 trillion mark happened in 2009. In just 9 more years, we are now at more than $21 trillion. And counting.

Aside from the fact that that is fiscally unsustainable, in that period between 2009 and now, the reason we didn't drown in interest payments was the Federal Reserve monetizing that debt -- keeping nominal interest rates along the yield curve at ridiculously low and artificial levels. Basically, Soviet style economic management of our currency. Our government sells bonds -- the debt we accumulate. The biggest buyer of that debt during that period after 2009, until recently, was our own central bank! It is empowered to create dollars out of thin air (which has been how every empire in history has fallen), and it created trillions of dollars of that credit with the press of a button . . . . and used it to buy our own debt. It is insanity.

This is unprecedented. So yeah, I am guilty of figuring there is no f'in way on earth that can go on indefinitely before it ends like all ponzi-like schemes do. I also know what I am looking at. Maybe they could monetize an insane amount debt longer than I every could have imagined. But the leverage and debt they have left in their wake, permeating all kinds of things, is not imaginary. There are going to be massive defaults. Ask yourself how you can borrow endlessly and create money out of thin air (i.e. create credit at your whim) to enable it. It's been silly season, whether people understand what they do or not. And there is a nasty price to pay at some point when confidence gives and people panic because there is an unsustainable debt and leverage problem that everyone got too deep into.