The Government Is Bankrupt and Will Destroy The Economy [economicnoise]
August 21, 2012 Leave a comment
Most people don’t understand the unsolvable problem the US government has created for itself and its citizens. Sovereign default is beyond a likelihood; it is inevitable. When and which (possibly all) obligations are defaulted on are to be determined. Panicked political decisions, likely in the near future, will produce a complete financial and economic collapse. Hopefully that is the worst that will occur.
Official Government Debt
The official federal debt is $16 Trillion. This debt represents 100% of current GDP. Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart studied countries with high levels of government debt. This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, their well-acclaimed book, contains their findings. The authors concluded:
In our study “Growth in a Time of Debt,” we found relatively little association between public liabilities and growth for debt levels of less than 90 percent of GDP. But burdens above 90 percent are associated with 1 percent lower median growth. Our results are based on a data set of public debt covering 44 countries for up to 200 years. The annual data set incorporates more than 3,700 observations spanning a wide range of political and historical circumstances, legal structures and monetary regimes.
