by Alexander Trigaux, Editor, GoldSilver
The President. The Senate. The House. Their silence on the issue tells you all you need to know.
Forget any semblance of fiscal responsibility. Washington has completely given up on bare-bones fiscal sanity.
What would you call a ceiling that has been that demolished four times? Surrounded by the assorted rubble, you wouldn’t feel the raindrops on your head, see the storm clouds gathering, and think “Hmm, what’s wrong with the ceiling?” You’d think, “Damn. There’s nothing there.”
And there isn’t. Between the absurdist mock-constraint of a debt “ceiling” that everyone knows can be ignored and the overheated faux-panic about “government shutdowns” (which don’t seem to affect much of anything, even when they happen), there is literally nothing stopping politicians from debt spending at will except, well, their will.
Since the Tea Party came to a quiet and undistinguished end, paying any attention to government spending has gone far out of fashion.
And why not? We have a president who, after promising to not just balance the budget, but pay off the entire existing US debt balance, is on pace to add more debt in just four years than even Obama did in eight. And Obama added an eye-watering $8.5T!
This is not a partisan issue. Without looking at the dates along the x-axis, see if you can tell the difference in fiscal policy between the Obama administration and the Trump administration:
No difference. It doesn’t matter what politicians say, because they all do the same thing. Spend money they don’t have in a desperate attempt to make halfway good on promises some previous president made. Their non-solution solution is always the same. Their answer to bad debt is more and more bad debt.
Perhaps the most-offensive-to-common-sense part of this racket these days is that we are constantly being told how amazing the economy is doing. How fantastic things are.
How well would your life appear to be going if you allowed to spend on a magic credit card that had no limit and was accepted everywhere? You’d seem to be thriving like never before, no doubt. Until your magic card got cut off and it was time to pay up.
Of course, you could prove you were hopelessly in debt, declare bankruptcy, and walk away with a clean slate.
The US can’t default without worldwide economic calamity. Demise-of-the-dollar-as-currency shockwaves would rock global markets to their foundations.
And yet there is no chance we will ever be able to pay off this debt. There is no way out that won’t require a seismic shift in commerce and in society.
Which is exactly why Mike Maloney believes the coming wealth transfer will be the greatest in human history.
Capital will rush out of stocks. Rush out of bonds. Rush out of cash. And it will crowd into the single best store of value humankind has ever known.
Which is why we buy gold and silver today, while it is at 50-year inflation-adjusted lows. Then? We wait for the day a tsunami of panicked worldwide capital frantically bids up the prices of the finite assets we already own.