As the man said:
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
This ain't no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey
I ain't got time for that now....
From The Economist, May 2:
Without good luck or a painful adjustment, the only way out will be to let inflation rip
If prudence is a virtue then America’s budget is an exercise in vice. Over the past 12 months the federal government has spent $2trn, or 7.2% of GDP, more than it has raised in taxes, after stripping out temporary factors. Usually such a vast deficit would be the result of a recession and accompanying stimulus. Today the lavish borrowing comes despite America’s longest stretch of sub-4% unemployment in half a century. The deficit has not been below 3% of GDP, an old measure of sound fiscal management, since 2015, and next year Uncle Sam’s net debts will probably cross 100% of GDP, up by about two-fifths in a decade. Whereas near-zero interest rates once made large debts affordable, today rates are higher and the government is spending more servicing the debt than on national defence.
How has it come to this? The costs of wars, a global financial crisis and pandemic, unfunded tax cuts and stimulus programmes have all piled up. Both Republicans and Democrats pay lip service to fiscal responsibility. But the record of each side in office is of throwing caution to the wind as they indulge in extra spending or tax cuts. The biggest economic decision facing the next president is how generously to renew Donald Trump’s tax cuts of 2017, a step that will only worsen America’s dire fiscal trajectory.
This profligacy cannot go on for ever—at some point, interest costs will rise to intolerable levels. The binge must therefore come to an end in some combination of three ways.
The least painful is that good fortune comes to the rescue. Until recently, falling global real interest rates contained the cost of servicing debts even as these grew in size. Today Japan just about manages with net debts about half as big again as America’s, relative to GDP, thanks to near-zero rates. If inflation is defeated and real interest rates fall back from their present highs, America could be off the hook, too. Another source of relief could be productivity growth. If it surges, say because of artificial intelligence, America could outgrow its debts.
Yet good luck cannot be assumed. The most responsible way for politicians to end the budget binge would be to correct course as the interest bill rises. The IMF estimates that America will need to cut spending, excluding debt interest, or raise taxes by 4% of GDP to stabilise its debts by 2029. It has managed a similar adjustment before, between 1989 and 2000, when “bond vigilantes” were said to have cowed Washington into submission.
The trouble is that the circumstances were then well-suited to belt-tightening. The end of the cold war yielded a peace dividend: falling defence spending accounted for fully 60% of the fiscal adjustment. As a share of the population the labour force climbed to an all-time high.
A real-wage boom made the pain of higher taxes more bearable. But today war and rising global tensions are pushing defence spending up and baby-boomers are retiring in droves.
That leaves the third and most worrying option: making creditors pay. America would never be forced by the markets to default, because the Federal Reserve can act as a buyer of last resort. Fiscal laxity could cause inflation, though, which would mean bondholders and savers taking a big real-terms hit....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also yesterday's "Société Générale's Albert Edwards Describes The Great Debt Endgame"
We looked at another possible end game exiting from March 20's ""Hotshot Wharton professor sees $34 trillion debt triggering 2025 meltdown as mortgage rates spike above 7%: ‘It could derail the next administration’"":
This is the sort of stuff I was thinking about in the intro to March 6's "Michelle Obama's office says the former first lady 'will not be running for president' in 2024":
...On the other hand, I'm not sure you would want to be President during the next four years, there are so many problems that have been growing and metastasizing just beneath the surface of the daily news that the person in the hot seat could end up just plain reviled.If I were a Democrat strategist I would propose letting Donald Trump win a second term while concentrating on House and especially Senate (to bottle up judicial, including Supreme Court, nominees) races.
A Trump win would give an excuse for riots (for the visuals) and if he is handcuffed by the Legislative branch to limit the range of possible responses, you go beyond polycrisis to the omnicrisis. Throw in a bit of Frances Fox Piven with her "overwhelm the system" and "motor voter" strategies and you could see one-party rule for thirty years....
