Speaker 1
Yeah, it doesn't account for the fact that the US can adjust its spending, but also income could pick up in the future, but it's based on certain growth assumptions, but also on how much spending they'll be based on current trends. But at a fundamental level, what actually is the problem with national debt? So the gist is, think of it as if it's a credit card. I know this is a bad example, but imagine that your debt is increasing at a certain rate. If your income is increasing at a greater rate, that's not a problem. So as long as GDP, which generates income for the US through taxes, as long as the US economy is growing more quickly than the debt, it's not a problem. That's the mathematical inequality, which you have to solve, grow faster than your debt. But what would happen if you didn't, and debt is a percentage of GDP kept rising? When does it become a problem? So if Japan's national debt is over 200%, what are we looking for in the economy? What would actually happen? It becomes a problem if people stop buying your debt, if they lose faith in your ability to work as an economy and to service the coupons. Because at that point, people will not buy your debt. In the US, we're just miles and miles and miles away from that, because everyone in the world is willing to buy US Treasuries. So you might stop being able to plug your deficits. Yeah. But then people have stopped buying Japanese debt, but their central bank just buys it more or less. Where's the issue? What's happened? I guess at a certain point, that itself becomes a problem because the Japanese central bank has to fund it via generating new money effectively. And if that goes beyond a certain level, then you could start to see inflationary problems. That's what I was getting to. The real constraint here is inflation, right? And this is a kind of doom scenario, which many gold investors, gold books, and also cryptocurrency investors love because it suggests that money effectively could become worthless. And it's true it could if people lose faith in it. A horrible fact is that ultimately, it's all a bit of a con game in the sense that you just have to convince people you're credible. And the thing is, no one really knows where that danger point is, I think, with national debt. Japan is the obvious example. You don't know when it's going to become unsustainable. And Noah Smith, the economist, compares it to the idea of we're walking down this infinite corridor towards an invisible pit, which I like. There is a pit there. There is a real danger, but who knows where it comes on this trajectory? I think for the US, it's a long way away. The US is such a large economy, and people still have faith in the US government. But that's a kind of privilege, which you don't want to squander. There's a lovely quote also from Thomas Gaygan.