The Greatest Debt Crisis The World Has Ever Seen Is Coming

September 17th, 2013

By Michael Snyder

The largest mountain of debt in the history of the world just continues to grow even larger, and everyone knows that this colossal debt spiral is not going to end well. But we all keep playing along because nobody wants the party to end. Right now, there is an unprecedented ocean of red ink covering the planet. Globally, governments have never been in so much debt, corporations have never been in so much debt and consumers have never been in so much debt. But every time someone suggests that this is a problem and that we should at least try to get debt levels to settle down a bit, people start screaming that “austerity” will hurt the global economy. And of course it will. But we can’t continue to live way, way above our means indefinitely. Well, we can try, but at some point this entire house of cards is going to come crashing down and we are going to be facing the greatest economic crisis the world has ever seen.

It is kind of like watching a slow-motion train wreck that you have no chance of possibly stopping that you know will end up killing lots of innocent people. This debt crisis is going to end up destroying the global financial system, but there is not a thing that you or I can do to prevent it from happening. The unprecedented debt binge that we are witnessing right now is going to continue until someday we hit a brick wall of financial disaster. We can yell and we can scream, but it isn’t going to stop what is happening.

As the Telegraph recently noted, even the Bank for International Settlements is warning that debt levels are way too high. According to the BIS, total public and private debt levels are now 30 percent higher than they were in 2008…

“This looks like to me like 2007 all over again, but even worse,” said William White, the BIS’s former chief economist, famous for flagging the wild behavior in the debt markets before the global storm hit in 2008.

“All the previous imbalances are still there. Total public and private debt levels are 30pc higher as a share of GDP in the advanced economies than they were then, and we have added a whole new problem with bubbles in emerging markets that are ending in a boom-bust cycle,” said Mr White, now chairman of the OECD’s Economic Development and Review Committee.

The BIS can see the disaster coming, but even they have no chance of preventing it.

For the rest of this article, I am going to focus on government debt, but please keep in mind that corporate debt and consumer debt are also totally out of control globally. It would be very hard to overstate the nightmare that we are facing.

But of course national governments are the biggest offenders when it comes to debt…


Asia

Japan now has a debt to GDP ratio of more than 211 percent, and as Simon Black of the Sovereign Man blog recently detailed, they are rapidly heading toward a national financial meltdown…

Looking purely at the numbers, Japan’s medium-term fundamentals are among the bleakest in the world.

Total government debt amounts to over 200% of the country’s entire GDP– a figure so large that the Japanese government spends 51.5% of the 43 trillion yen ($430 billion) they collect in tax revenue just to pay interest!

Perhaps even more astounding is that ‘primary balance expenses,’ i.e. normal government expenditures, totaled 70.3 trillion yen, or 163% of tax revenue.

The only way they’ve managed to stay afloat is by issuing more debt, which makes the problem even worse. In fact, 46% of the 2013 budget is being financed by debt.

These guys are running out of rope. And fast.

China is facing a different sort of a problem. In that nation, the growth of private domestic debt is wildly out of control.

According to a recent World Bank report, private domestic debt in China has grown from 9 trillion dollars in 2008 to 23 trillion dollars today.

There is no way that is sustainable, and at some point that massive bubble is going to burst.


Europe

Even though some European nations have supposedly implemented “austerity measures” in recent years, debt levels continue to rise rapidly. The following are some numbers that were recently released which show that government debt to GDP ratios for some of the most financially troubled nations in Europe are absolutely soaring…

• Euroarea: 92.2%, up from 88.2% a year ago
• Greece: 160.5%, up from 136.5% a year ago
• Italy: 130.3%; up from 123.8% a year ago
• Portugal: 127.2%, up from 112.3% a year ago
• Ireland: 125.1%, up from 106.8% a year ago
• Spain: 88.2%, up from 73.0% a year ago
• Netherlands: 72.0%, up from 66.7% a year ago

Anyone that tells you that the crisis in Europe is “over” is lying to you. The debt crisis is getting worse, not better.




The United States

The biggest mountain of debt of all can be found in the United States.

30 years ago, the national debt was a little bit above a trillion dollars.

Today, it is rapidly approaching 17 trillion dollars.

At this point, the U.S. already has more government debt per capita than Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain. And since Barack Obama entered the White House, the debt to GDP level has soared to unprecedented heights…

Sadly, this is just the beginning.

One reason for this is that the U.S. is facing some tremendous demographic challenges in the years ahead.

In other words, our population is getting older.

It is being projected that the number of Americans on Social Security will rise from 57 million today to more than 100 million in 25 years.

How in the world are we possibly going to pay for that?

Already, we are very heavily dependent on foreigners to pay our bills.

According to the U.S. Treasury, foreigners hold approximately 5.6 trillion dollarsof our debt at this point.

China and Russia account for about one-fourth of that total. Right now, China owns approximately 1.275 trillion dollars of our debt, and Russia owns approximately 138 billion dollars of our debt.

So what would happen if we went to war with Syria and they decided to quit borrowing from us and they started dumping our debt instead?

That is a very good question.

And actually, according to Zero Hedge foreigners have already started to dump a little bit of our debt…

Today’s TIC data showed something disturbing: for the fourth month in a row, foreigners were net sellers of US Treasury paper in July, as total foreign holdings declined from $5.600 trillion to $5.590 trillion which represents 49% of total marketable debt (including the debt owned by the Fed of course). In other words, since peaking at $5.724 trillion in March, foreign-held debt has declined by $134 trillion, at a time when yields have surged on fears the Fed’s tapering of its own purchases of bonds will mean less Fed frontrunning opportunities.

We certainly cannot afford for that to continue, because we desperately need other nations to finance our reckless spending.

Our debt is wildly out of control, and the only way we can keep the entire system from collapsing is to go into even more debt.

As I noted recently, if the U.S. national debt was reduced to a stack of one dollar bills it would circle the earth at the equator 45 times.

That is a whole lot of money.

But most Americans do not consider it to be a problem because disaster has not struck yet.

Unfortunately, they simply don’t understand how quickly an exponential problem can overwhelm you. I think that the following illustration from Simon Black is particularly helpful…

Let’s say you’re at a party in a small apartment that’s about 500 square feet in size. Then suddenly, at 11pm, a pipe bursts, starting a trickle into the living room.

Aside from the petty annoyance, would you feel like you were in danger? Probably not. This is a linear problem– the rate at which the water is leaking is more or less constant, so the guests can keep partying through the night without worry.

But let’s assume that it’s an exponential leak.

At first, there’s just one drop of water. But each minute, the rate doubles. So by 11:01pm, there’s 2 drops. By 11:02, 4 drops. And so forth.

By 11:27pm, there’s only six inches of standing water. Yet by 11:31pm, just four minutes later, the entire room is under nearly 8 feet of water. And the party’s over.

For nearly half an hour, it all seemed safe and manageable.People had all the time in the world to leave, right up until the bitter end. 11:27, 11:28, 11:29. Then it all went from benign to deadly in a matter of minutes.

By the time that our politicians and the talking heads on the mainstream media admit that we have a debt emergency on our hands, it will probably be far, far too late.

The greatest debt crisis the world has ever seen is coming, and there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it.

But you can take measures to get prepared for it.

Please get prepared while you still can.

Republicans: There's No Debt Crisis, We Just Want to Screw the Poor

Appearing on Sunday morning talk shows this weekend, Boehner and Ryan revealed that their push for spending cuts is all about ideology — not economic collapse.
March 18, 2013  |   By Alyssa Figueroa

Appearing on Sunday morning talk shows this weekend, both Republican House majority leader John Boehner and Republican Congressman Paul Ryan admitted that there is no imminent debt crisis.

On ABC’s “This Week,” Boehner said he agrees with President Obama that there is no immediate crisis concerning the country’s debt.

Boehner told ABC’s Martha Raddatz:

We do not have an immediate debt crisis. But we all know that we have one looming. And we have-- one looming-- because we have entitlement programs that are not sustainable in their current form. They're gonna go bankrupt. Washington has responsibility-- to our seniors and our near seniors-- that we firm up these programs so that they're there for the long term. Because if we don't do it, not only will they not get benefits, we will have a debt crisis right around the corner. We have time to solve our problems. But we need to do it now.

Later, on “Face the Nation,” Paul Ryan agreed, even boasting that the United States is handling debt better than European countries and has a “resilient economy.”

Then he admitted to CBS’s Bob Schieffer:

We do not have a debt crisis right now, but we see it coming. We know it’s irrefutably happening. And the point we’re trying to make with this budget is let’s get ahead of this problem.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party continues to push through a budget that emphasizes cuts to the so-called “entitlement” programs. Ryan’s proposed budget would cut more than $4 trillion from the federal budget — bringing government spending to the lowest levels since 1948. And it’s balanced mostly on the backs of the poor, as he proposed to slash Medicare, Medicaid and other social welfare programs like food stamps. His plan would also repeal Obamacare. Overall, 66 percent of his proposed budget cuts would be cuts to those with low and middle incomes.

Admitting that there’s no immediate crisis illustrates that the GOP’s proposed monstrous cuts to social welfare programs are more an attempt to push through their ideology than save the country from collapse. As the media continues to hyperbolize the deficit, the need for compromise and the instantaneous dangers that will occur if we don’t impose austerity cuts, Republicans are happily using the spin to quickly demand these absurd cuts. But now, especially with both parties acknowledging that there’s no immediate debt crisis, we must demand an honest, smart budget from Congress.

The Obscenely Rich Men Bent on Shredding the Safety Net

They want to cut social security and medicare to line their own pockets, not to address the budget deficit/national debt.--jef

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CEOs talk about shared sacrifice, but the only thing they want to share is your retirement money with their wealthy friends. 

By Lynn Stuart Parramore | AlterNet

New York magazine calls it a “Mass Movement for Millionaires.” The New York Times' Paul Krugman sums up the idea: “Hey, sacrifice is for the little people.”

The Campaign to Fix the Debt is a huge, and growing, coalition of powerful CEOs, politicians and policy makers on a mission to lower taxes for the rich and to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid under the cover of concern about the national debt. The group was spawned in July 2012 by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, architects of a misguided deficit reduction scheme in Washington back in 2010. By now, the "fixers" have collected a war chest of $43 million. Private equity billionaire Peter G. Peterson, longtime enemy of the social safety net, is a major supporter.

This new Wall Street movement, which includes Republicans and plenty of Democrats, is hitting the airwaves, hosting roundtables, gathering at lavish fundraising fêtes, hiring public relations experts, and traveling around the country to push its agenda. The group aims to seize the moment of the so-called "fiscal cliff" debate to pressure President Obama to concede to House Republicans and continue the Bush income tax cuts for the rich while shredding the social safety net. The group includes Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Honeywell’s David Cote, Aetna’s Mark Bertolini, Delta Airlines’ Richard Anderson, Boeing’s W. James McNerney, and over 100 other influential business honchos and their supporters.

Corporations represented by the fixers have collected massive bailouts from taxpayers and gigantic subsidies from the government, and they enjoy tax loopholes that in many cases bring their tax bills down to zero. Sometimes their creative accountants even manage to get money back from Uncle Sam. For instance, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, Boeing has paid a negative 6.5 percent tax rate for the last decade, even though it was profitable every year from 2002 through 2011.

These CEOs talk about shared sacrifice, but it seems that they don’t intend to share anything but your retirement money with their wealthy friends. As New York mag reports:

“Most on-the-record comments are a mishmash of platitudes about shared sacrifice and working together for the good of the country. But interviews with a number of organizers and CEO council members point to a massive networking effort among one-percenters — one that relies on strategically exploiting existing business relationships and appealing to patriotic and economic instincts."

As the Fix the Debt gang moves around the country spreading their message, they are starting to attract public protests. On November 27, they were greeted in North Carolina with a rally  from NC Progress, which called for an end to the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent and told the group to keep its hands off the middle-class wallet. The fixers are often vague about their mission, and they tend to speak in coded language that conceals their actual goals. Let’s have some blunt talk about what the fixers want to do and why they want to do it – talk you're unlikely to hear in mainstream media supported by corporate advertising.

1. “Fix” means cut: When they say “fix” Social Security, they mean cut Social Security. Fixers want to convince the public that a well-managed, hugely popular program that does not add to the deficit (it’s self-funded) is somehow in crisis and requires intervention in the form of various cutting schemes. They seek this because many of the rich do not want to pay taxes for Social Security, and financiers want very much to move toward privatization of retirement accounts so they can collect fees on such accounts.

2. “Reform” means rob. When the say “reform” the tax code, they mean “make taxes even lower for the rich.” The wealthy do not pay their fair share of taxes in the United States, which is a major reason there is a large deficit in the first place. When the very wealthy pay lower tax rates than ordinary working people, the result is an increasing redistribution of income upward that puts the U.S. in the top 30 percent in income inequality out of 140 nations, according to the Central Intelligence Agency [7]. We’re a shameful #42. Income inequality is not only unfair, it’s dangerous and makes society unstable.

3.“Bipartisan” means all of the rich. Fix the Debt is a pro-business ideological movement pretending to be a bipartisan group of concerned citizens. But the group is really just a coalition for the greedy, unpatriotic rich. There are plenty of financiers and other 1 percenters in the Democratic Party, and some of them have decided to join forces with their GOP counterparts to work toward a goal that means a great deal to all of them: Making the rich even richer.

4. “Concern” means covet. There was a time, a couple of generations ago, when business leaders would not dare to go public with their desire to increase income inequality and stick it to hard-working Americans. When Owen D. Young, CEO of General Electric in the '20s and '40s, spoke to an audience at Harvard Business School in 1927, he emphasized that the purpose of a corporation was to provide a good life not only to owners, but also to employees. Corporations, he said, were meant to serve the larger goals of the nation:

“Here in America, we have raised the standard of political equality. Shall we be able to add to that, full equality of economic opportunity? No man is wholly free unless he is both politically and economically free.”

Fast forward to 2012: Jeffrey Immelt, the current CEO of GE, is a member of the Fix the Debt Campaign, which is designed to lower the expectations of hard-working Americans. Goldman Sachs honcho Lloyd Blankfein explained this recently in a CBS interview:

 “You’re going to have to do something, undoubtedly, to lower people’s expectations of what they’re going to get, the entitlements, and what people think they’re going to get, because you’re not going to get it.” ~ Goldman Sachs CEOLloyd Blankfein

5. “Fiscal conservative” means economically confused. Longtime Wall Street executive Steve Rattner, one of Obama’s auto bailout czars, has been using his influence to attract tycoons from the financial industry to the Fix the Debt movement. Over the last year, Rattner has been on a crusade to convince Americans that they should put aside their worries about real crises like unemployment to focus on the deficit. Rattner, like many of his cohorts, poses as a moderate whose thinking is needed to counter the advice of respected economists like Nobel Prize-winners Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, who have long been warning that defict hysteria is not only counterproductive, but based on a lack of understanding of how the economy actually works.

Political economist Thomas Ferguson, who teaches at UMass Boston and is a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, described the dubious policies the fixers defend:

“Talk about the audacity of hope! The people who brought you the Great Recession by pushing deregulation and financial leverage to insane dimensions are back. Now they propose to ‘fix the debt’ by throwing average Americans who generously bailed them out in 2008-09 over the fiscal cliff.

One trusts that even in our money-driven political system, their transparently self-interested nonsense will be firmly rejected. There is no reason why anyone needs to do anything at all about Social Security for a long time; as even Peter Orszag admits in the fine print. It just isn't a driver of the deficit.

The U.S. does need to reduce its spending on defense and it certainly needs to aggressively contain medical costs. But you do both of those the old fashioned way. In the case of defense, you stop plunging into wars and attend carefully to what actually is needed to defend America. In the case of medical spending, you end ‘fee for service’ schemes that reward endless tests and procedures and you vigorously pursue anti-trust and regulatory remedies. You don't simply cut Americans off from health care. It's ridiculous that we have ‘single payer’ for ailing banks, but not citizens. If you are worried about the deficit, just let tax rates rise back to the levels of the Clinton era, when growth ran far ahead of today's economy, and tax dividends, carried interest, and capital gains at the rates working Americans pay. And don't, absolutely don't, let American companies escape taxation by stashing their money abroad.”

6. "Strip-mining is not leadership." Fixers present themselves as magnanimous, responsible leaders doing what they believe is best for the country. But that’s a tough sell when you’re advocating policies that mainly benefit…yourself.

Economist Rob Johnson, director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and also a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, shared his view of the Campaign to Fix the Debt in an email. As he memorably put it, "strip-mining is not leadership":

“I believe that a convincing argument depends upon the demonstrated self-sacrifice of the leader offering a vision. This group does not appear to be doing something for the nation. They are doing something for their own self-interest (tax liability). There is confusion between: 1) what is good for business and therefore jobs, something we all should be concerned about; and 2) the personal benefit of CEOs based on who bears the burden of the debt reduction plan. This group does not seem to gain the credibility that comes from generous contribution through self sacrifice. As a result they will arouse great suspicion rather than inspire us as 'leaders' who are guiding the design of a just, productive and coherent society.  

With all of the suspicion of leadership in America,  business, media, scholars and politicians have to lead in a credible way. This just looks like guys defending their self-interest in a dysfunctional period of our nation's history because elites take so much for themselves.”

It's no secret that the wealthy have done extremely well over the last several decades, even since the Wall Street-driven financial crash that devastated millions of Americans. In 2010, the top 1 percent of U.S. families raked in as much as 93 percent of the country’s income growth, according to Emmanuel Saez, a UC Berkeley economist who looked at IRS data.

Which raises several important questions for Bowles, Simpson, Blankfein, Rattner & Co.: How much is enough? How far are you willing to tip the balance of income in the country toward the wealthy? What concern do you really have about the deficit, or for that matter, the future of America? Inquiring minds want to know. 

Bush tax cuts and wars account for half the public debt by 2019

Occupy Wall Street Rediscovers the Radical Imagination

Sunday, September 25, 2011 by the Guardian/UK
The young people protesting in Wall Street and beyond reject this vain economic order. They have come to reclaim the future.

by David Graeber

 

 

Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation – despite the latest police crackdown – sent out sparks across America, within days, inspiring hundreds of people to send pizzas, money, equipment and, now, to start their own movements called OccupyChicago, OccupyFlorida, in OccupyDenver or OccupyLA?

 There are obvious reasons. We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates (not just the youth but some of us geezers get the same treatment--jef).

Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?

Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.

But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.

Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. Even the Economist was running headlines like "Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?"

It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an "economy" is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they'd been before.

Perhaps, it's not surprising. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result, we're all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart.

What we've learned now is that the economic crisis of the 1970s never really went away. It was fobbed off by cheap credit at home and massive plunder abroad – the latter, in the name of the "third world debt crisis". But the global south fought back. The "alter-globalization movement", was in the end, successful: the IMF has been driven out of East Asia and Latin America, just as it is now being driven from the Middle East. As a result, the debt crisis has come home to Europe and North America, replete with the exact same approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the name of "austerity".

The form of resistance that has emerged looks remarkably similar to the old global justice movement, too: we see the rejection of old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below. What's different is largely the target: where in 2000, it was directed at the power of unprecedented new planetary bureaucracies (the WTO, IMF, World Bank, NAFTA), institutions with no democratic accountability, which existed only to serve the interests of transnational capital; now, it is at the entire political classes of countries like Greece, Spain and, now, the US – for exactly the same reason. This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognizing the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged.

When the history is finally written, though, it's likely all of this tumult – beginning with the Arab Spring – will be remembered as the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire. Thirty years of relentless prioritizing of propaganda over substance, and snuffing out anything that might look like a political basis for opposition, might make the prospects for the young protesters look bleak; and it's clear that the rich are determined to seize as large a share of the spoils as remain, tossing a whole generation of young people to the wolves in order to do so. But history is not on their side.

We might do well to consider the collapse of the European colonial empires. It certainly did not lead to the rich successfully grabbing all the cookies, but to the creation of the modern welfare state. We don't know precisely what will come out of this round. But if the occupiers finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold that has been placed on the human imagination, as in those first weeks after September 2008, everything will once again be on the table – and the occupiers of Wall Street and other cities around the US will have done us the greatest favor anyone possibly can.

JP Morgan explains the euro crisis with Lego

Felix Salmon

This chart comes from a Michael Cembalest’s research note today. The key is in there too. I’m not making this up:

1. The toreador in a floppy hat, and the F1 driver with his helmet, represent Spain, Italy and the rest of the Euro Periphery.
2. The three men with helmets, shields, and medieval weaponry represent the CDU, CSU and FDP parties in Germany.
3. The blue-and-white sailor boy is Finland. Obvs.
4. The woman with an oversized carrot and her friend in overalls with a shovel represent the Social Democrats and Greens.
5. Wotan represents the Bundesbank.
6. The piggy bank is the IMF.
7. The grey-haired Banque chap is the ECB.
8. The chap in the red bib is Poland.
9. The artists are France.
10. The angry chef, the sweeper with a broom, the airline pilot, and the rest of the motley crew at bottom left, represent EU taxpayers in Core countries.
11. The storm troopers are the EU Commission and Euro Group Finance Ministers, chaired by Jose Manuel Barroso and Jean- Claude Juncker.
12. The monocled banker and his assistant are EU bondholders and shareholders.

Full credit here is given to “Peter Cembalest, who specializes in conceptualization of such phenomena”; I assume that Peter (age 9) helped out too with the Icelandic bonus extra, for people who make it to page three. But Iceland sadly didn’t make the cut as one of the “12 players in the EMU Debt Crisis most likely to affect policy from here”.

Cembalest does at one point feel the need to explain what he’s doing here:

If today’s diorama analysis borders on the absurd, so does maintaining the fiction that accumulation of massive public and private sector claims in Europe can somehow be engineered away.

Still, I like the idea of sitting all the key European players in a room with a box of lego and telling them to work things out that way. The results couldn’t really be more farcical than those of the EU bank stress tests.