What's really interesting is where exactly the debt is going.
If the US were funneling money into long-term programs designed to improve the country and its residents' lives and/or earn some return on investment, that would be one thing.
Instead, it seems focused on continually increasing military spending (to little effect - see: Straight of Hormuz) and reducing the proportion of the tax revenues coming from its wealthiest individuals while taking a chainsaw to programs helping the poorest without any significant savings to show for it.
You couldn't do a worse job if you were following step-by-step instructions by an adversary for sabotaging the country from within.
It’s going to paying for an aging demographic and medical care. The same as literally every western country. Which is why I don’t view this as a particularly American issue.
America is doing a bad job of addressing this, but it also has more leeway.
Because the US does not control other countries fiscal policy which is where government debt rates come from. Germany and the UK have entirely different ways to determine fiscal and currency policy from each other, not to mention from the US.
If there is correlation between those things it’s either by choice (the German people tieing their government to the US) or it’s demographic.
"The secretary of state effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government. His grip on the country is a vivid manifestation of American power in the Trump era."
This is but one of many examples of the broad reach of American control over other countries' policies.
Treasuries are priced alongside term SOFR at one year [1][2]. The cost to insure U.S. debt is in line with where it's been for the last five years [3]. (And around where they were ten years ago.)
This has nothing to do with investors' perceptions of U.S. credit and everything to do with the financial rates environment.
earlier this year the fed quietly ended QT and began "reserve management" so they're buying the front end and letting the long end do its thing.
then in steps kevin warsh... historical backdrop: warsh resigned from the fed in 2011 because the fed owned too many assets. since then the fed bought 4 trillion more more than doubling the size of the fed balance sheet
warsh wants to shrink the balance sheet. only way to do that is to buy less treasuries, but the only reason 30 year mortgage isn't >15% is because the fed is the biggest buyer of long dated treasuries and mortgage backed securities (as in MBS i.e. the paper not the prince) since 2009...
so if warsh gets what he wants the long end is guaranteed to spike
then you add in the executive branch trying to to re-engineer the current account balance w the mar-a-lago accord and the correct reaction is not "wow rates are high" its "wow its kind of amazing rates are as low as they are in the long end", especially with the private markets gulping down as much gpu collateralized debt as it can without dislocating a jaw...
> This has nothing to do with investors' perceptions of U.S. credit and everything to do with the financial rates environment
It absolutely is related to investors' perceptions of U.S. credit worthiness. The news is about the 13th of August 2026 auction.
Entities lending money to US want increasingly higher compensation, which is unsurprising considering that the US projected deficits are ballooning (an estimated 7.4% both in 2026 and 27). US has already blown past 1.8T in deficit in the first 6 months of 2026 alone. That's higher than the deficit for the entirety of 2025.
Finding money to absorb all this spending is not easy and lenders are spooked by inflation and borrowing levels.
> It absolutely is related to investors' perceptions of U.S. credit
Related to, not evidence of. I added a CDS reference which isolates the credit component.
> Entities lending money to US want increasingly higher compensation
Entities lending money in dollars want higher compensation. There is no evidence they demand a risk premium from the United States.
What we are seeing is an increasing term premium. But that doesn't have to do with the U.S.'s perceived creditworthiness, it's a function of money supply and demand.
> Several factors have driven the rise in bond yields, including higher inflation expectations amid elevated energy prices following the Iran war and uncertainty surrounding a new Federal Reserve Chair. But the more fundamental concern is the US fiscal position: persistently high budget deficits have reached 6 percent of GDP, while government debt now exceeds the size of the US economy.
> In Fiscal Year 2026, which ends in September, the US Treasury is expected to issue around $2 trillion of securities on a net basis. Gross issuance, meanwhile, could reach a staggering $20 trillion according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. That gap reflects the sheer volume of debt that needs to be rolled over, much of it resulting from the Treasury’s decision under former Secretary Janet Yellen to favor shorter maturities when rates were lower and curves were upward sloping.
> US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been attentive to the resulting borrowing costs and their impact on the budget deficit, which is why the Treasury has sought to limit pressure on the US bond market from foreign central banks that need dollars. During a recent joint FX market intervention with Japan, the Treasury sold euros for yen rather than dollars, avoiding transactions that would have required selling Treasuries. It has also asked the Fed to raise the limit on its Foreign and International Monetary Authorities repo facility, allowing the Bank of Japan and other foreign central banks to borrow short-term dollars against Treasuries rather than sell them in the open market, which could put further upward pressure on yields.
> “Investors are being asked to absorb a growing supply of government debt globally at a time when deficits remain large, inflation uncertainty persists” and the Federal Reserve is no longer a major buyer, said Michal Stanczyk, portfolio manager for the global fixed income team at Allspring Global Investments.
> “If investors continue demanding greater compensation for inflation and fiscal risks, long-term yields could move higher and away from 5% even if Treasury auctions remain well covered,” he said.
We can reasonably debate if investors should treat the U.S. as a riskier credit. But these auctions, CDS data and other funding rates for high-quality non-U.S. dollar-denominated credits (e.g. Saudi Arabia's dollar-denominated debt [2]) do not show what the article implies they do.
Forgive me if I defer to the bond market and treasury auction data. The data shows a path to a potential debt spiral and crisis based on yields demanded and debt outstanding. Current annual debt servicing expense is already ~$1T/year.
> Then the treasury fills these orders from the lowest to highest bid
No, it does not. Treasury goes down the list until it has allocated the auction and then everyone gets the marginal rate. (And that's for competitive bids. You can also submit a non-competitive bid with no price–that gets filled first.)
> US paying the highest rates in 25 years means the buyers are expecting higher premiums
Would recommend looking up credit versus rates. It’s a useful construct.
> they ask them because they are worried about inflation
Nope. Do you know what TIPS are? You can compare the price of a normal Treasury and a TIP to get what Treasury buyers think about inflation. That's the breakeven-inflation rate in my top comment.
If you say you think they're wrong, I think I might agree. But the data–Treasury auction and insurance data–speak unambiguously to these points of investors' views, specicially, creditworthineness and inflation expectation.
> Blinder and Watson reported that budget deficits tended to be smaller under Democrats at 2.1% potential GDP versus 2.8% potential GDP for Republicans, a difference of about 0.7 of a percentage point. They wrote that higher budget deficits should theoretically have boosted the economy more for Republicans, and therefore cannot explain the greater GDP growth under Democrats.[3] Since 1981, federal budget deficits have increased under Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, both Bushes, and Trump, while deficits have declined under Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama. The federal government ran surpluses during Clinton's last four fiscal years, the first surpluses since 1969. The deficit was projected to decline sharply in Biden's first fiscal year.
The last pre-GFC Bush II year of 2007 had a federal budget deficit of $163B. The budget deficit in 2016, Obama’s last year, was $587B.
The last pre-Covid Trump I year of 2019 had a $984B deficit. After Covid, Biden’s final full year deficit was $1.83T.
There’s a non-zero correlation between any number of policy choices by both parties and the GFC or Covid, but it’s hard to see these primarily as anything but exogenous shocks.
Sure, if you exclude the big increases, you can draw different conclusions.
GFC was not an exogenous shock, and even if it was, a) Bush was in office setting policy the prior 6 years and b) the specific response was not preordained (for ex: it is not part of the Constitution that rich people must pay lower tax rates than they did in 1982, that invariant is a policy choice).
This is what I meant by stories you could tell. Other folks blame Glass-Steagall repeal, which happened during the Clinton administration. The Big Short blamed it on the invention of the MBS a couple decades earlier.
IAE, nobody thinks it was a mistake to make a massive fiscal investment in 2008 to avert a depression, as you say. It’s hard to say that is a meaningful signal about the budgetary prudence of the GOP vs. Democrats.
Similarly, if Covid had hit in 2016, it wouldn’t have discredited Obama’s budgetary acumen if he spent a trillion on backstopping the economy against it.
Imagine if all this capital investment in AI were instead being focused on solar build out. The vibes would be much more positive, but the return on capital for solar panels frankly looks paltry compared to what LLM tokens by the quadrillions can do.
Congress sets the budgets (well, is supposed to, but yes there has been pretty excessive delegation to the executive) so you really want to say every Congress # + White House.
When you break it up that way, there have been several fiscally conservative congresses + good presidency combos, most notably under Clinton where they reformed welfare, increased taxes and managed to get a budget surplus one year. The formula seems to be slim Democratic Party majorities in Congress with a Democrat president.
So yes it’s rare but good governance + rising tides can make a difference.
Did the British Empire collapse during the Suez Crisis of 1956, when it was embarassingly unable to open a major shipping chokepoint via military force?
Did we know it had by 1957, or did that take a little longer to confirm the shape of the decline?
In retrospect the inability of the empire to hold Singapore against the Japanese in WW2 and leave Australia in the hands of the US was the unraveling of the British empire. The Dutch one as well with the fall of the Dutch East Indies.
Didn't we rather embarrasingly withdraw from Afghanistan recently after two decades of trying to build a functioning government, only to have the Taliban take it back in a matter of days?
You're kinda making the point I'm making; the sound of an empire collapsing is often a long rumble, not a sudden snap.
If your suggestion is that the US might be in decline and there have been lots of signals of that going back 30 years, I’m pretty sympathetic. But if it’s specifically the Iran war fiasco compared to the Suez incident I’d suggest those aren’t particularly the same.
Did the US lose control of the most populous part of its “empire” in the last 20 years? Did it get its population and infrastructure destroyed across 2 generations in world wars in the last 50?
Has the US just come off of required rationing for basic food stuffs and been running in 20 years of austerity?
Or is the US still the dominant economy in the world, with a problem of over abundance of staples and stuff?
The idea that late 1950s uk and the 2026 us are equivalent is laughable.
> Did the US lose control of the most populous part of its “empire” in the last 20 years?
I might count alienating NATO and China's growing independence as uncomfortably close to that, yes.
> Has the US just come off of required rationing for basic food stuffs and been running in 20 years of austerity?
Doesn't that make our inability to effectively project power more embarassing? We don't even have to scrap our warships to fund operations; we're dismantling our global soft power sources willingly.
> Or is the US still the dominant economy in the world, with a problem of over abundance of staples and stuff?
By the time of the Suez incident the uk hadn’t been the dominant global economy for going on 70 years. The second Boer war is probably a better example of shocking poor outcome for their empire by that timeline.
Queen Victoria was still alive at that point and ww1 was in the future. Even after ww1 when it was obvious the empire was severely diminished the English retained outsized soft power at least and had until the 60s for the empire to be truly dismantled.
Kinda, yes. Osama Bin Laden's express goal was to bankrupt the U.S. by provoking it into a war it could not win. Three wars in the Middle East later, and $33T in additional government debt, and hear we are.
9/11 was arguably the most effective asymmetric attack in the annals of military history, in terms of simple weapon effect.
At the same time, it spells out the limits of seeing the world in terms of weapon effect: an American population brutalized by twenty years of occupation; Israel binding tight alliance with Saud; a resurgent heretic Shia power; a meteoric rise of China - historically far more of a foe to Islam than the West. None of these are what you might call brilliant for Bin Laden's ultimate goals.
When we fire a gun we don't know what that bullet does twenty years from now.
9/11 eroded American democracy in ways that wouldn’t be considered possible. What we observe now is just one more chapter of a long fall that has started in the mid 1980s. Increasing income inequality, breeding dissatisfaction to the point a former reality show character gets elected president.
This all was done by many hands - Putin being an obvious one also destabilising the European Union and NATO, and China acquiring the manufacturing prowess the US decided wasn’t worth the effort anymore, and so on. Add to that what seems to be the last straw, a unified payment system that doesn’t uses the dollar as its currency, and you have the perfect storm.
Was it Stalin who said the capitalist will gladly sell you the rope you’ll use to hang them?
Entire global society collapse is probably less than 25 years away due to climate change spiraling out of control. Relative to that the US national debt hardly even matters.
If only it could get fucked in isolation like that country. It's basically Rome and the whole planet is its empire, whatever happens the shockwaves affect everyone on the planet.
It feels weird to focus on US debt here when the entire west is facing similar challenges (except Switzerland…)
The UK bonds are the highest since the 90s and Japanese debt has never been higher.
There is a fiscal problem but it’s not an _American_ one unless you just assume all international finance is a US issue.
What's really interesting is where exactly the debt is going.
If the US were funneling money into long-term programs designed to improve the country and its residents' lives and/or earn some return on investment, that would be one thing.
Instead, it seems focused on continually increasing military spending (to little effect - see: Straight of Hormuz) and reducing the proportion of the tax revenues coming from its wealthiest individuals while taking a chainsaw to programs helping the poorest without any significant savings to show for it.
You couldn't do a worse job if you were following step-by-step instructions by an adversary for sabotaging the country from within.
It’s going to paying for an aging demographic and medical care. The same as literally every western country. Which is why I don’t view this as a particularly American issue.
America is doing a bad job of addressing this, but it also has more leeway.
> It’s going to paying for an aging demographic and medical care
Is it though? I thought US life expectancy was falling behind the rest of the world?
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/why-american...
> unless you just assume all international finance is a US issue
Why wouldn't you? 2008's collapse of the US housing market caused a global recession. It's the single largest economy on the planet.
Because the US does not control other countries fiscal policy which is where government debt rates come from. Germany and the UK have entirely different ways to determine fiscal and currency policy from each other, not to mention from the US.
If there is correlation between those things it’s either by choice (the German people tieing their government to the US) or it’s demographic.
> Because the US does not control other countries fiscal policy…
I can't even begin to imagine how someone says this with a straight face.
Because I don’t assume lack of agency in the rest of the world? You’ll note I put that in my original comment.
> Because I don’t assume lack of agency in the rest of the world?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/us/politics/how-marco-rub...
"The secretary of state effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government. His grip on the country is a vivid manifestation of American power in the Trump era."
This is but one of many examples of the broad reach of American control over other countries' policies.
Treasuries are priced alongside term SOFR at one year [1][2]. The cost to insure U.S. debt is in line with where it's been for the last five years [3]. (And around where they were ten years ago.)
This has nothing to do with investors' perceptions of U.S. credit and everything to do with the financial rates environment.
[1] https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/...
[2] https://www.global-rates.com/en/interest-rates/cme-term-sofr...
[3] https://en.macromicro.me/charts/68239/us-5year-cds
earlier this year the fed quietly ended QT and began "reserve management" so they're buying the front end and letting the long end do its thing.
then in steps kevin warsh... historical backdrop: warsh resigned from the fed in 2011 because the fed owned too many assets. since then the fed bought 4 trillion more more than doubling the size of the fed balance sheet
warsh wants to shrink the balance sheet. only way to do that is to buy less treasuries, but the only reason 30 year mortgage isn't >15% is because the fed is the biggest buyer of long dated treasuries and mortgage backed securities (as in MBS i.e. the paper not the prince) since 2009...
so if warsh gets what he wants the long end is guaranteed to spike
then you add in the executive branch trying to to re-engineer the current account balance w the mar-a-lago accord and the correct reaction is not "wow rates are high" its "wow its kind of amazing rates are as low as they are in the long end", especially with the private markets gulping down as much gpu collateralized debt as it can without dislocating a jaw...
> This has nothing to do with investors' perceptions of U.S. credit and everything to do with the financial rates environment
It absolutely is related to investors' perceptions of U.S. credit worthiness. The news is about the 13th of August 2026 auction.
Entities lending money to US want increasingly higher compensation, which is unsurprising considering that the US projected deficits are ballooning (an estimated 7.4% both in 2026 and 27). US has already blown past 1.8T in deficit in the first 6 months of 2026 alone. That's higher than the deficit for the entirety of 2025.
Finding money to absorb all this spending is not easy and lenders are spooked by inflation and borrowing levels.
> It absolutely is related to investors' perceptions of U.S. credit
Related to, not evidence of. I added a CDS reference which isolates the credit component.
> Entities lending money to US want increasingly higher compensation
Entities lending money in dollars want higher compensation. There is no evidence they demand a risk premium from the United States.
What we are seeing is an increasing term premium. But that doesn't have to do with the U.S.'s perceived creditworthiness, it's a function of money supply and demand.
It’s absolutely a risk premium. The market is slowly pricing in no appetite to reduce the US deficit.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/are-risi...
> Several factors have driven the rise in bond yields, including higher inflation expectations amid elevated energy prices following the Iran war and uncertainty surrounding a new Federal Reserve Chair. But the more fundamental concern is the US fiscal position: persistently high budget deficits have reached 6 percent of GDP, while government debt now exceeds the size of the US economy.
> In Fiscal Year 2026, which ends in September, the US Treasury is expected to issue around $2 trillion of securities on a net basis. Gross issuance, meanwhile, could reach a staggering $20 trillion according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. That gap reflects the sheer volume of debt that needs to be rolled over, much of it resulting from the Treasury’s decision under former Secretary Janet Yellen to favor shorter maturities when rates were lower and curves were upward sloping.
> US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been attentive to the resulting borrowing costs and their impact on the budget deficit, which is why the Treasury has sought to limit pressure on the US bond market from foreign central banks that need dollars. During a recent joint FX market intervention with Japan, the Treasury sold euros for yen rather than dollars, avoiding transactions that would have required selling Treasuries. It has also asked the Fed to raise the limit on its Foreign and International Monetary Authorities repo facility, allowing the Bank of Japan and other foreign central banks to borrow short-term dollars against Treasuries rather than sell them in the open market, which could put further upward pressure on yields.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-13/us-braces...
> “Investors are being asked to absorb a growing supply of government debt globally at a time when deficits remain large, inflation uncertainty persists” and the Federal Reserve is no longer a major buyer, said Michal Stanczyk, portfolio manager for the global fixed income team at Allspring Global Investments.
> “If investors continue demanding greater compensation for inflation and fiscal risks, long-term yields could move higher and away from 5% even if Treasury auctions remain well covered,” he said.
Risk premium!
> It’s absolutely a risk premium
It's objectively not–that's what CDS measure.
> higher inflation expectations
Not reflected in the data [1].
We can reasonably debate if investors should treat the U.S. as a riskier credit. But these auctions, CDS data and other funding rates for high-quality non-U.S. dollar-denominated credits (e.g. Saudi Arabia's dollar-denominated debt [2]) do not show what the article implies they do.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10YIE
[2] https://live.deutsche-boerse.com/bond/xs2747599509-saudi-ara...
Forgive me if I defer to the bond market and treasury auction data. The data shows a path to a potential debt spiral and crisis based on yields demanded and debt outstanding. Current annual debt servicing expense is already ~$1T/year.
https://www.pgpf.org/programs-and-projects/fiscal-policy/mon...
> Forgive me if I defer to the bond market and treasury auction data
TIPS are Treasuries. The breakeven-inflation rate is calculated entirely from Treasuries.
> data shows a path to a potential debt spiral and crisis based on yields demanded and debt outstanding
Sure. The data also–unambiguously–show that Treasury prices are not pricing in a U.S. default or runaway inflation.
Do you know how bond auctions work? It's based on a price-discovery mechanism.
The treasury announces it wants to sell $ 25B of 30Y bonds.
Then investors submit offers saying in effect how much yield they demand to buy them.
Then the treasury fills bids from the lowest yield upwards in tranches.
> Do you know how bond auctions work?
Yes. What do you think I don't understand?
Do you understand the difference between credit and rates?
I don't think you understand that at bond auctions buyers submit bids essentially setting at which rate they will buy the bonds.
Then the treasury fills these orders from the lowest to highest bid.
So all of your post make no sense. US paying the highest rates in 25 years means the buyers are expecting higher premiums.
And they ask them because they are worried about inflation and elevated borrowing levels.
> Then the treasury fills these orders from the lowest to highest bid
No, it does not. Treasury goes down the list until it has allocated the auction and then everyone gets the marginal rate. (And that's for competitive bids. You can also submit a non-competitive bid with no price–that gets filled first.)
> US paying the highest rates in 25 years means the buyers are expecting higher premiums
Would recommend looking up credit versus rates. It’s a useful construct.
> they ask them because they are worried about inflation
Nope. Do you know what TIPS are? You can compare the price of a normal Treasury and a TIP to get what Treasury buyers think about inflation. That's the breakeven-inflation rate in my top comment.
If you say you think they're wrong, I think I might agree. But the data–Treasury auction and insurance data–speak unambiguously to these points of investors' views, specicially, creditworthineness and inflation expectation.
> Then the treasury fills these orders from the lowest to highest bid.
This is literally exactly wrong. Which is pretty par for the course when someone asks you if you understand how something works in the internet.
I dunno, guys, maybe hiring a guy who bankrupted 4 casinos wasn't the right way to go after all
Hey, he's a businessman! He extracts value for shareholders!
I fully support blaming Orange Foolius for, well, everything. But hasn't every administration since Reagan contributed to this?
Including Reagan.
And so much of it has to do with the influence of The Heritage Foundation.
Not exactly.
> Blinder and Watson reported that budget deficits tended to be smaller under Democrats at 2.1% potential GDP versus 2.8% potential GDP for Republicans, a difference of about 0.7 of a percentage point. They wrote that higher budget deficits should theoretically have boosted the economy more for Republicans, and therefore cannot explain the greater GDP growth under Democrats.[3] Since 1981, federal budget deficits have increased under Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, both Bushes, and Trump, while deficits have declined under Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama. The federal government ran surpluses during Clinton's last four fiscal years, the first surpluses since 1969. The deficit was projected to decline sharply in Biden's first fiscal year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_p...
That’s a really small data set to draw any strong conclusions from.
None of these big swings between administrations had much to do with policy:
Clinton inherited the end of the Cold War and resulting “peace dividend”.
Obama inherited a Federal government already spending hundreds of billions to address the GFC.
Similarly, Biden inherited a Covid recovery budget spending an additional trillion or so.
> Orange Foolius
As a kid in the 80s/90s who spent a non-zero amount of time in a mall, I just wanted to highlight how great this name is.
Those things were delicious.
Just the Republcian ones.
Clinton changed a 300b deficit into a 100b surplus. Obama reduced it from 1.4t to 500b.
Biden also slashed it but that’s a little unfair due to covid.
The last pre-GFC Bush II year of 2007 had a federal budget deficit of $163B. The budget deficit in 2016, Obama’s last year, was $587B.
The last pre-Covid Trump I year of 2019 had a $984B deficit. After Covid, Biden’s final full year deficit was $1.83T.
There’s a non-zero correlation between any number of policy choices by both parties and the GFC or Covid, but it’s hard to see these primarily as anything but exogenous shocks.
> last pre-GFC Bush II
> last pre-Covid Trump I
Sure, if you exclude the big increases, you can draw different conclusions.
GFC was not an exogenous shock, and even if it was, a) Bush was in office setting policy the prior 6 years and b) the specific response was not preordained (for ex: it is not part of the Constitution that rich people must pay lower tax rates than they did in 1982, that invariant is a policy choice).
Sure, but absent the GFC, Bush-era tax rates + spending choices pushed the deficit to a low % of GDP we’d kill for right now.
Do you think lower high-income marginal rates caused the GFC?
You forget the huge bank bailouts caused by Bush's policies in 2008. That is why it spiked. Obama brought it down during his admin.
Without that spending, the recession of 2008 would have been the same or worse as the depression of the 1930s.
This is what I meant by stories you could tell. Other folks blame Glass-Steagall repeal, which happened during the Clinton administration. The Big Short blamed it on the invention of the MBS a couple decades earlier.
IAE, nobody thinks it was a mistake to make a massive fiscal investment in 2008 to avert a depression, as you say. It’s hard to say that is a meaningful signal about the budgetary prudence of the GOP vs. Democrats.
Similarly, if Covid had hit in 2016, it wouldn’t have discredited Obama’s budgetary acumen if he spent a trillion on backstopping the economy against it.
I personally blame that repeal, but I an not an economist so I really cannot prove my belief.
I just hope we are not walking into another 2008, I think we are, but again my economic knowledge is just a crystal ball and a magic 8 ball :)
I wouldn’t worry too much.
Imagine if all this capital investment in AI were instead being focused on solar build out. The vibes would be much more positive, but the return on capital for solar panels frankly looks paltry compared to what LLM tokens by the quadrillions can do.
Yes
Except Clinton.
Didn't the rules for how CEOs are paid change under Clinton?
The tax code was changed to discourage large cash comp, and companies switched most comp to stock. Not particularly germane to the deficit.
Congress sets the budgets (well, is supposed to, but yes there has been pretty excessive delegation to the executive) so you really want to say every Congress # + White House.
When you break it up that way, there have been several fiscally conservative congresses + good presidency combos, most notably under Clinton where they reformed welfare, increased taxes and managed to get a budget surplus one year. The formula seems to be slim Democratic Party majorities in Congress with a Democrat president.
So yes it’s rare but good governance + rising tides can make a difference.
Hear that? It’s the sound of an empire collapsing.
Did it collapse in 2001?
Did the British Empire collapse during the Suez Crisis of 1956, when it was embarassingly unable to open a major shipping chokepoint via military force?
Did we know it had by 1957, or did that take a little longer to confirm the shape of the decline?
In retrospect the inability of the empire to hold Singapore against the Japanese in WW2 and leave Australia in the hands of the US was the unraveling of the British empire. The Dutch one as well with the fall of the Dutch East Indies.
India was already independent by then. That seems like it would have been a pretty strong signal.
Didn't we rather embarrasingly withdraw from Afghanistan recently after two decades of trying to build a functioning government, only to have the Taliban take it back in a matter of days?
You're kinda making the point I'm making; the sound of an empire collapsing is often a long rumble, not a sudden snap.
If your suggestion is that the US might be in decline and there have been lots of signals of that going back 30 years, I’m pretty sympathetic. But if it’s specifically the Iran war fiasco compared to the Suez incident I’d suggest those aren’t particularly the same.
> But if it’s specifically the Iran war fiasco compared to the Suez incident I’d suggest those aren’t particularly the same.
Yes, one's a superpower failing to project power over a critical waterway to much international embarassment, the other is… oh.
Did the US lose control of the most populous part of its “empire” in the last 20 years? Did it get its population and infrastructure destroyed across 2 generations in world wars in the last 50?
Has the US just come off of required rationing for basic food stuffs and been running in 20 years of austerity?
Or is the US still the dominant economy in the world, with a problem of over abundance of staples and stuff?
The idea that late 1950s uk and the 2026 us are equivalent is laughable.
> Did the US lose control of the most populous part of its “empire” in the last 20 years?
I might count alienating NATO and China's growing independence as uncomfortably close to that, yes.
> Has the US just come off of required rationing for basic food stuffs and been running in 20 years of austerity?
Doesn't that make our inability to effectively project power more embarassing? We don't even have to scrap our warships to fund operations; we're dismantling our global soft power sources willingly.
> Or is the US still the dominant economy in the world, with a problem of over abundance of staples and stuff?
Like the UK once was?
By the time of the Suez incident the uk hadn’t been the dominant global economy for going on 70 years. The second Boer war is probably a better example of shocking poor outcome for their empire by that timeline.
Queen Victoria was still alive at that point and ww1 was in the future. Even after ww1 when it was obvious the empire was severely diminished the English retained outsized soft power at least and had until the 60s for the empire to be truly dismantled.
Again, all this asserts "it takes a while", which I'm not contesting at all.
Kinda, yes. Osama Bin Laden's express goal was to bankrupt the U.S. by provoking it into a war it could not win. Three wars in the Middle East later, and $33T in additional government debt, and hear we are.
9/11 was arguably the most effective asymmetric attack in the annals of military history, in terms of simple weapon effect.
At the same time, it spells out the limits of seeing the world in terms of weapon effect: an American population brutalized by twenty years of occupation; Israel binding tight alliance with Saud; a resurgent heretic Shia power; a meteoric rise of China - historically far more of a foe to Islam than the West. None of these are what you might call brilliant for Bin Laden's ultimate goals.
When we fire a gun we don't know what that bullet does twenty years from now.
9/11 eroded American democracy in ways that wouldn’t be considered possible. What we observe now is just one more chapter of a long fall that has started in the mid 1980s. Increasing income inequality, breeding dissatisfaction to the point a former reality show character gets elected president.
This all was done by many hands - Putin being an obvious one also destabilising the European Union and NATO, and China acquiring the manufacturing prowess the US decided wasn’t worth the effort anymore, and so on. Add to that what seems to be the last straw, a unified payment system that doesn’t uses the dollar as its currency, and you have the perfect storm.
Was it Stalin who said the capitalist will gladly sell you the rope you’ll use to hang them?
Entire global society collapse is probably less than 25 years away due to climate change spiraling out of control. Relative to that the US national debt hardly even matters.
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Isn't Europe locked in a rather unprecedented heat wave right now?
Scientists did get it wrong; it's been faster than predicted. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/scienti...
And much of East Asia.
"Potatoes ‘boil’ in the ground as record heatwave sweeps across swathes of Asia"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/13/asia-heatwave-...
Didn't we just tie for the hottest Earth month on record?
Another wave of inflation is coming in the next 6 months or what?
> Another wave of inflation is coming in the next 6 months or what?
No, at least according to Treasury buyers [1].
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10YIE
Looks right about like when we entered 2008, if you zoom out.
Great economy you got there. Couldn't bribe Japan to not sell off their US Bonds and now they need to attract bag holders by raising rates.
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The US is going the way of Zaire.
If only it could get fucked in isolation like that country. It's basically Rome and the whole planet is its empire, whatever happens the shockwaves affect everyone on the planet.