Waking Up To America’s Debt

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With the election just two weeks away, markets appear to be waking up to the threat posed by America’s debt binge. “Concerns about the fiscal outlook and its potential upward pressure on inflation have become more acute,” Neuberger Berman’s Robert Dishner tells Bloomberg News. Marketwatch writes of fears over “the path of the U.S. deficit.” Fortune asks whether gold is “safer than U.S. Treasury bonds,” since “federal debt keeps soaring.”

The focus — welcome, if overdue — on debt is coming into view partly as a result of the Fed’s apparent success in bringing the pace of inflation down without sparking a downturn. So “rising deficits,” strategist Lawrence Gillum tells Marketwatch, are “more of an issue since the bond market isn’t worried about an imminent recession anymore.” The markets are now spooked by “the amount of Treasury debt that’s likely to come into the market,” he adds.

A billionaire hedge fund chief, Paul Tudor Jones, on Tuesday joined the chorus of concern, “raising alarms about the U.S. government’s current fiscal deficit,” as CNBC put it. “We are going to be broke really quickly unless we get serious about dealing with our spending issues,” Mr. Jones cautioned. He suggested that “the bond market may force the government’s hand after the election in addressing it.”

Considering the bipartisan failure to tackle the looming crisis of federal debt, though, such an intervention could be America’s best hope. It calls to mind political strategist James Carville’s quip about the power of the debt markets. “I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a .400 baseball hitter,” he said. “But now I would want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”

The debt debacle, to be sure, is hardly confined to these shores. The IMF just sounded an alarum of its own, warning that government debt globally was projected to rise, by the end of the decade, to match the annual level of world economic output. It’s no coincidence, these columns noted, that this explosion in debt comes as the fiat dollar’s value in terms of gold has plummeted to a record low, less than a 2,700th of an ounce.

The global glut of debt is a hallmark of the age of fiat money. Under the gold standard — or even the more lax gold exchange standard, which ended only in 1971 — running up debt on this scale would have been impossible. That’s because the requirement that currency be convertible into specie puts a fiscal discipline on governments — and central banks. It acts as a brake on government spending, as much as borrowing, and militates against profligacy.

The fretting over debt, and Fortune’s dispatch asking whether gold could become a safer bet than America’s Treasury bonds, though, all signal a growing strain on the fiat money house of cards. The debt deluge, in short, is proving unsustainable. “Ultimately, something has to give,” Bank of America analysts contend. “If markets become reluctant to absorb all the debt and volatility increases, gold may be the last perceived safe haven asset standing.”

That echoes arguments advanced for years by sound money advocates. Today’s inflated asset valuations are a funhouse mirror image of the run-up in debt. They both reflect the debasement of fiat money vis-à-vis gold, the historic basis of value. The explosion in federal debt, on the verge of exceeding the size of the American economy, could never have taken place when the dollar was defined in terms of gold and convertible on demand for specie.

Which brings us back to America’s debt disaster. If Washington can’t make the cuts needed to avert a crisis, could the bond markets force a reckoning? It could arrive sooner than either party would like since the Congress slated the debt ceiling to return on January 2, 2025 — just in time for the next president to confront the flood of red ink. “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight,” Samuel Johnson reckoned, “it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

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