for Miguel
You can call everyone for dinner, because our goose is cooked. We are so in debt that the only way we can keep the whole system from collapsing is to keep borrowing even more money. Perhaps you have been through a similar scenario with your own personal finances. When you simply don’t have enough money to pay your bills, borrowing more money can seem like a really easy short-term fix. Unfortunately, the US government has been doing this for decades, and now our national debt spiral has reached a terminal stage. Even if we pooled all the money in every bank account in America, we wouldn’t be able to pay the national debt. The debt level is skyrocketing at an exponential rate, and the only way the federal government can continue to pay the bills is to continue borrowing and spending colossal mountains of money that we must borrow from someone else.
As I write this article, the US national debt stands at $31.4 trillion.
But the total value of all the goods and services produced in the United States last year was only about $25 trillion.
Our leaders in Washington could try to reverse course by balancing the budget, but that would lead to short-term economic disaster.
Just think about it.
What do you think would happen if a couple trillion dollars of government spending were suddenly sucked out of the economy?
We would immediately plunge into a horrible economic depression.
Sadly, the truth is that we have been borrowing from the future to make the present much more pleasant. We are enjoying an artificially inflated standard of living that we do not deserve, and we have been using debt to finance that artificially inflated standard of living.
But now the day of reckoning has come.
Of course, it’s not just the federal government that has gone completely nuts.
Our state and local governments are collectively more than 3 trillion dollars in debt.
Corporate debt in the United States has now passed the $12 trillion mark.
And the total debt of US households now exceeds $18 trillion.
As the US economy has slowed in recent months, an increasing number of Americans have turned to credit card debt.
So now credit card debt is mounting at an exponential rate while the saving rate has fallen to a record low.
And at this point, the average interest rate on credit card balances is the highest in history.
I don’t even have the words to describe how self destructive we are being.
At all levels of society, debt levels are absolutely skyrocketing.
We are literally committing national financial suicide, but many people don’t seem to care.
And a lot of people don’t seem to care because they don’t even understand what’s going on.
At this point, our “education system” has produced hordes of completely clueless individuals who can barely function in modern society.
But instead, our leaders have been free to systematically destroy our financial future for a long time, and very few of us have cared enough to object.
Unfortunately, we have reached a point where there is no going back.
We have already destroyed the reserve currency of the planet.
We have already created runaway inflation.
The Federal Reserve has been feverishly raising interest rates, but that is dramatically raising the costs of debt service at all levels of our society, and it is also causing economic activity to slow down all around us.
Companies across the United States are now laying off workers, and that includes even Google…
On Friday, Alphabet-owned Google announced it was cutting 12,000 employees, about 6% of the full-time workforce. While employees had been preparing for a possible layoff, they are questioning leadership over the criteria for the layoffs, surprising some employees, who woke up to find their access to company property was cut off. Some of the laid off employees had been in the role for a long time or had been recently promoted, raising questions about the criteria used to decide which jobs were cut.
Shortly after CEO Sundar Pichai’s initial email to employees on Friday morning, Google search chief Prabhakar Raghavan sent an email to employees saying he “also feels a responsibility to communicate” and asking them to save questions for next week’s town hall. There will be “bumps in the road” as the organization moves forward with the layoffs, Raghavan noted.
Why is Google doing this?
No corporation in the entire country is stronger than them.
If there is a company in the United States that should not lay off workers, it is Google.
Of course, almost every big tech company is laying off workers these days.
Microsoft is laying off workers.
Amazon is laying off workers.
Facebook is laying off workers.
Twitter is laying off workers.
We haven’t seen anything like this since 2008, and that’s because we haven’t had an economic crisis like this since 2008.
Many people are going to lose their jobs in the next few months.
And the economic pain that we will experience in 2023 will only be the beginning, because the entire system It’s starting to fall all around us.
Did you really think we could go on the biggest debt binge in all of human history and it would all work out somehow?
That’s not how the real world works.
We sat back and did nothing while our leaders made disastrous decisions for decades, and now we will be forced to watch in horror the consequences of those decisions right before our eyes.
