Get Rich Education 527: Countdown to Disaster—Four Threats Facing the U.S. with Richard Duncan
Keith discusses the current state of the US economy, noting that while it is considered strong by conventional measures, there are four major threats on the horizon that the country is not doing enough to address. He’s joined by our guest, macroeconomic expert, Richard Duncan to discuss these topics. Richard proposes a solution that could strengthen the US's competitive position against China.
Shifting from Capitalism to Creditism.
Also, hear about the risks facing the real estate and stock markets in the near-term, such as the historically high wealth-to-income ratio and the ongoing quantitative tightening by the Federal Reserve.
Learn more about Richard’s work through his video newsletter, Macro Watch. Use discount code GRE for 50% off at:
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Complete episode transcript:
Automatically Transcribed With Otter.ai
Keith Weinhold 0:01
Keith, welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, per conventional measures, today's us. Economy is strong, but there are four vicious threats on the horizon, and we're not doing enough about them. Our macroeconomist guests will discuss that with us today. How alarming is it, and what's the solution to our crises, this week on get rich education,
Speaker 1 0:27
since 2014 the powerful get rich education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show Host Keith Weinhold writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad advisors, who delivers a new show every week since 2014 there's been millions of listener downloads of 188 world nations. He has a list show guests and key top selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki, get rich education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener phone apps build wealth on the go with the get rich education podcast. Sign up now for the get rich education podcast, or visit get rich education.com
Corey Coates 1:12
You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.
Keith Weinhold 1:28
Welcome to GRE from Fort Wayne, Indiana to Fort Lee New Jersey and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold, and you are back inside get rich education. We've been here for you, every single week since 2014 coming off of an election last week, this spurs more macroeconomic thought, monetary and fiscal policy, and more than that. And you know, one thing that I'm always looking for are signs of inflation versus deflation, because we live in a long term inflationary world. Well, you wouldn't keep a million bucks under a mattress because it would only be worth 300k in a few decades. But in deflation, you would flip your strategy and actually be a saver. You might keep millions out of the mattress, because deflation would actually increase the purchasing power of every single one of your dollars. Now, I've got a pretty unpopular take for you here at some point, probably now you've got to give the Fed credit for a soft landing. And what does a soft landing mean? Exactly. It means bringing down inflation without putting the economy into a recession. Well, inflation is down to about 2% now, unemployment is still low, near 4% and GDP growth for last quarter came in at 2.8% okay, yes, I sure understand that those benefits are distributed unevenly, but at this point, how much more of a soft landing Do you really want? And by the way, this sure doesn't mean that I love the Federal Reserve. I mean, they get no credit from me for not jumping on inflation sooner, when it peaked two and a half years ago, or even before that point, well, those high consumer prices as a result of that are still with us, and that's a problem, and they got that part wrong. We're about to talk with our global macroeconomic expert, really. He is one of the foremost authorities in the entire world today. We're going to talk about four major catastrophes the US economic future faces. One of those four is our ballooning national debt and deficit. And to review that for you, first, the debt is our overall accumulation of debt over the years now at 36 trillion. And when it comes to these awful, dreadful debt and deficit issues, I will ask our guests the question, when is it game over? Where is that tipping point? What would need to happen and the deficit? Okay, that refers to the annual shortfall, the annual thing, that shortfall that our bloated government keeps coming up with at the end of every year, all right, so therefore revenue minus spending equals deficit. Another way to say that is income minus expenses equals a deficit when the expenses are greater than the income. Well, that figure is near $2 trillion we're spending 2 trillion more than we raise in revenue each year. And here's an example. I'll use real world numbers rounded off to the nearest trillion. So if the government's annual revenue is only 5 trillion and you have to subtract out spending, which is 7 trillion, that could. Gives us an annual deficit of 2 trillion, pretty simple stuff, and that more or less gets added onto our overall debt of 36 trillion. Another major problem is this growing competition from China. Yes, I know that people like to discuss their demographic problems, but still, their population is more than four times the US population, and you learn about what other advantages they have over us and what we direly need to do to catch up. In our guests opinion, these issues incur some rather detailed explanations. So I'm really going to let our guest expert takeover for a while today, this weekend, I will be in San Antonio, Texas. San Antonio is an uptrending real estate market because they are really a beneficiary in distribution with their proximity to Mexico in the near shoring movement that's taking place. And then I will be in Austin, Texas, for a few days, Austin is one of the few major US metros that have seen rents substantially decline recently. I'll bring you next week's show from Austin, where I might talk more about that. Then, from the 20th to the 24th of this month, I'll be in New Orleans at the famed New Orleans investment conference, where they're pulling out all the stops at the 50th anniversary of the event, and that is the longest running investment event in America and perhaps the world. I hope to meet some of you there in New Orleans, just like I do each time I'm at the event. Let's talk about the bigger picture economy that your real estate and investments float within next.
This week's guest is the author of four books analyzing the crises that brought the global economy to the brink of collapse in recent decades. One of the books forecast the 2008 global financial crisis with great accuracy. We're going to discuss future crises here today, before we're done, he has worked as an equities and Investment Analyst, and then he went on to hold some rather esteemed roles at the World Bank in DC and as a consultant to the IMF in Asia. He joins us from Thailand today. He now publishes a video newsletter called macro watch, and long time listeners know that today's guest was also this show's very first guest that was back on GRE podcast episode seven, only 10 years ago now, in November 2014, and he's really become quite the friend of the show, and we've looked out for each other ever since. It's terrific to have back global macro economist Richard Duncan
Richard Duncan 7:46
Keith, hey, thank you for having me back. It's great to speak with you again.
Keith Weinhold 7:50
Oh, it's so good to have you here an entire decade of our lives. And as times change, economies are surely dynamic, and you're so good at spotlighting crises and explaining them in a way to people that they can understand. So Richard, why don't you talk to us now about risks facing the nation? Yes, I'm talking about the United States.
Richard Duncan 8:15
A lot of podcasts focus on all the problems the United States is facing, and it is certainly true that the United States is facing very serious risk. So I'd like to start off this conversation telling you what I think the greatest risk facing our country are. There are four main things I'd like to hit on. The first is something you mentioned to me before in our exchange of emails, is that the US government does have a very high level of government debt relative to GDP, and the budget deficits are large. So that's problem number one. Problem number two, in my opinion, looking at this from where I live in Asia, is that the United States is at risk of being conquered by China in the not too distant future. Risk Number Two. Risk Number three, we have very serious domestic political divisions within the United States. Risk Number four is that our post capitalist economic system, which I call creditism, must have credit growth to survive. If credit contracts, then our economy will spiral into a Great Depression that will be probably worse than the one of the 1930s so those are the big four problems that we have, and it doesn't do anyone any good just to talk about our country's problems if you don't offer a solution to them. So in my opinion, all of these problems can be overcome by accelerating economic growth in the United States, while all of these problems would be made very much worse by anything that causes us economic growth to slow down. The way to make the US economy grow much faster is to have the US Government finance a very, very large investment in the industries and technologies of the future over the next 10 years, starting immediately. The alternative austerity would cause the economy to spiral down into deflation. We'd like your listeners to think of austerity when they hear the word austerity. I'd like them to think of the word death. It's austerity is equal to death. Yeah, the US doesn't have to be a declining power. The first American Century doesn't have to be the last. It can be the first of many. The solution for driving the US economy to grow much more rapidly and solving all four of the problems that I mentioned above is a US sovereign wealth fund. Thank heavens. Both parties now support the establishment of a US sovereign wealth fund. On September 5, former President Trump came out in support of establishing a US sovereign wealth fund, and on the following day, the Biden administration said, then working on this for months and had a plan that they were developing. So this is fantastic news for the United States. It offers great hope for solving all of our greatest problems. And I'd like to spend, you know, a few minutes explaining to your listeners what a US sovereign wealth fund is, yes, urgently necessary, and why both parties have now come to understand why this is important to establish.
Keith Weinhold 11:27
Yeah, please tell us why you think the US sovereign wealth fund is so urgently needed, and what it is because for even longer than the 10 years since you were first here, for about 15 years now, you have championed and promoted this US sovereign wealth fund. You discussed it on CNBC Squawk Box and all over the place. Last year, you presented about it in a speech in DC to 15 members of the House, Ways and Means Committee. So tell us about the US sovereign wealth fund and why you think it's urgently needed.
Richard Duncan 11:56
Let's begin with, what is a sovereign wealth fund? Well, effectively, a sovereign wealth fund is where a country invest in individual companies or even in startups. There are sovereign wealth funds all around the world. Norway has the largest, Singapore has two very effective ones called gdic and Temasek, which had been enormously profitable and successful, and it made the people in Singapore much richer. So a sovereign wealth fund in the United States would be an investment bond financed by the United States government with the US. This investment fund would take stakes in existing companies and also in startup companies, hopefully on a very large scale. Now, some people have asked, Why is this framework necessary? Why do we need a sovereign wealth fund to do that when the government is already making investments in the military, for instance, and funding some R and D research? Well, the difference between what the government is doing now and a sovereign wealth fund is with a sovereign wealth fund, the government would actually keep equity stakes in these companies that they invest in, meaning that when these companies they invest in become enormously profitable, the profits would be owned by every American. The Americans would have the equity stakes in all of the investments that this sovereign wealth fund makes. And it would be a situation where the government provides the financing, but the private sector manages the companies. The government just finances these companies in new industries and new technologies, and the government has the ability to invest on a very much larger scale than the private sector does. For example, The United States has a lot of great companies in the private sector that have accomplished really, truly great things in recent years and long past as well. But these private sector companies cannot invest on the same scale that the Chinese government can. The Chinese government is investing on a much larger scale than any of the American companies could ever dream to invest on. And that's explains why China is overtaking us now technologically, and if they continue to invest at a rapid rate that they're doing currently, then before long, there are going to be far ahead of us technologically and therefore economically, and more worryingly, militarily, the US government has the ability to invest truly on a multi trillion dollar scale over the next decade in new industries and technologies, things like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, nanotech, biotech, genetic engineering and developing energy sources like fusion, and it has the ability to do this on such a large scale that it would be certain to succeed. And once these companies start creating cancer vaccines or fusion, for instance, they would be enormously profitable, and they could be listed on. NASDAQ at multi trillion dollar valuations, and the American public would own equity stakes in these companies, and would then would directly reap the rewards of these profits that these companies would generate. That is what a sovereign wealth fund is, why it's desperately needed, is, well, first of all, we should do it, because we can easily afford to do it. And the results, the breakthroughs, the technological breakthroughs and medical miracles that these sorts of companies would produce, would we really have the shot of curing all the diseases and radically extending life expectancy, developing sources of limitless energy that would bring down the cost of energy radically. Just across the board, it would induce a technological revolution that would turbo charge us economic growth, create UNDRIP wealth, and at the same time, shore up US national security in the face of this growing threat from China. So for all of those reasons, it is urgently necessary. In my opinion.
Keith Weinhold 16:04
both Norway and Singapore have had similar models to this. US sovereign wealth fund, and we certainly think of those two nations as prosperous places, tell me more about why it's a success so the government finances it does that incentivize companies to therefore take more risk?
Richard Duncan 16:25
It allows them to invest more. It allows them to invest on a much larger scale than that. Could if they have to rely on their own funding sources. Rather than investing millions of dollars, they could invest billions of dollars or 10s of billions of dollars. For instance, at the moment, the National Cancer Institute in the United States, this annual budget is $6 billion a year. $6 billion a year is not curing cancer. If we look back a few years ago, the Fed was creating $120 billion a month through quantitative easing per month. So with just 5% of one month of QE, you could double the National Cancer Institute's budget. Now that's not what this sovereign wealth fund would do. That just illustrates the scale. How much greater the scale would be that the government could invest on relative to what is currently being invested at the moment by the government and by the private sector combined.
Keith Weinhold 17:28
Do any critics ever ask about Wait? Is this too much government intervention into the free market? Is this a move away from capitalism? What do you say to those sort of critics?
Richard Duncan 17:38
I say to them that capitalism died in World War One. It certainly didn't survive the 20th century. Now the government. In the 19th century, we had capitalism. The government had very little involvement in the economy then and gold was money. But now gold is no longer money. The Fed creates some money. Government spending is something like nearly $7 trillion out of a GDP. That is around just not quite $30 trillion yet. So the government has been directing the economy going back at least since World War Two. This hasn't been capitalism for a very long time. Under capitalism, the private sector made investments, and some businessmen would make profits from their investments, and they would save that profit as capital and reinvest that capital. That's how capitalism grew. That's why they called it capitalism. It was based on capital accumulation and investment. But that's not how our economic system has worked for decades. Our system now is not driven by investment and saving by the private sector. It's driven by credit creation and consumption and more credit creation and more consumption and our economies has now been transformed from capitalism. It has evolved into creditism, with the government playing the directing role. So total credit in the United States, just last quarter blew through $100 trillion for the first time. By what I mean by total credit is the same thing as total debt. Total credit is equal to total debt. So this is all the debt of all sectors of the economy, the government sector, the household sector, the corporate sector, the financial sector, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac all the sectors of the economy, it just went through $100 trillion and Breda ism has created very rapid growth, especially all around the world, not only in the United States, because it has allowed the US economy to grow so rapidly and to import so much from other countries that this is why The Asian miracle occurred. I've lived through the Asian miracle because the US has been running massively large trade deficits since the early 1980s and all these countries in Asia have been running massively large trade surpluses, and all this spending that the Americans have been doing has been fueled by this rapidly. Radically expansion of credit. Total credit first went through $1 trillion in 1964 now it's $100,000,000,000,000. 60 years later. Now our system is not capitalism. The government is very involved. Anytime there's any problem with the economy, the government steps in. In 2008 the government prevented a new Great Depression when the private sector the households defaulted on their debts and caused all the banks to fail, and Freddie Mac did fail and had to be taken over by the government. So at that time, we narrowly avoided a Great Depression, because the government increased its budget deficits by more than a trillion dollars a year for four years in a row, and the Fed expanded. The Fed created three and a half trillion dollars between the end of 2007 and 2014, expanding its balance sheet by about five times. So that's not capitalism. We don't have capitalism. So people who are worried about us abandoning capitalism. They're behind the times that happened a long time ago. That shouldn't be a concern. They should be aware now that we are competing against players who don't play by the capitalist rules of little government intervention in the markets we're now competing against China, and China is one giant sovereign wealth fund intent on dominating the world by investing very aggressively in new industries and technologies. In the year 2000 the United States invested, I think, 10 times as much in research and development as China did. But now China is actually investing more in research and development and the US is and that explains why China is ahead in so many areas of technology. They had 5g years before we did. They are the leaders in electric vehicles and batteries. We have to put up 100% tariffs to keep out electric vehicles from China because they're so much better than our electric vehicles. They dominate solar panels. And are worse, they have hypersonic missiles and we don't, and I'm sure they have other military advantages that we don't, because they invest much more aggressively in new industries and technologies than our government does. And if we don't rectify this quickly, then we are soon going to be overtaken by China militarily, and our national security is at risk, much more than most Americans understand. But this realization has slowly grown on policymakers in Washington, and now both parties are worried about this, and this is why we have this growing fear of China, and why we have proposals to limit technology transfers to China, and this is why we've done things like the chips and science act, where the government has agreed to finance a $280 billion investment in new industries and technologies a couple of years ago, with 50 billion of that going into setting up manufacturing facilities within the in the US to create semiconductors, rather than relying solely on Taiwan to obtain all of our semiconductors, because China could take Taiwan at any moment, and then then he would end up with all the semiconductor chips that go into powering artificial intelligence. And whoever develops Artificial General Intelligence first is going to rule the world, and therefore it had better be the United States rather than China, because we don't want to live in a world dominated by China, believe me.
Keith Weinhold 23:26
Well, a lot of macro voices agree with you. About two months ago, we had the president of the Mises Institute here, and the way he characterized things are in the United States. 100 years ago, we had islands of socialism in a sea of capitalism, and today we merely have islands of capitalism in a sea of socialism. Do you see the US sovereign wealth fund being able to solve all four of the United States big problems that you outlined, debt and deficit conquering by China, political division and creditism. Can it solve all four of those?
Richard Duncan 24:04
Yes, it can. So as you know, Keith, a couple of years ago, I published my fourth book. It was called the money revolution. Yeah? How to find the book? Sure, yeah. How to finance the next American century. It was a subtitle. Now I argue that it would be very easy for the US to invest on a multi trillion dollar scale, new industries and new technologies over the next decade, and if we do that through a sovereign wealth fund, then would generate so much growth and be so profitable that instead of causing the government debt to increase, it would actually make the economy so much larger and generate so many more tax revenues, and the government would make so many profits from these companies that it has equity stakes in that it would reduce the government debt in absolute terms, and radically reduce the government debt relative to GDP, which would grow far faster than it has been growing in recent decades. This problem, number one, solved the high level of government debt. A high level of debt to GDP just make the GDP grow a lot faster, and the ratio of debt to GDP will go down. Problem number two is the US is at risk of being conquered by China. We can out invest China. We can invest more than China can afford to invest. We still have the best universities and the best entrepreneurs and scientists. So if we invest on a large enough scale, we will win, and China will not conquer us. Third, if the economy is growing at 7% a year instead of 1% a year, that is going to alleviate a lot of the domestic tensions that exist currently, much of the reason there's the origins of this domestic political divide that we're now suffering from in the US is because such a large part of the population has been left behind when all the factories moved overseas, countries like China and Vietnam, we de industrialized, and the people who Used to have good factory jobs, good, unionized, high paying factory jobs. All those people were left out in the cold, and they're not happy about it. And so if our economy were growing much more rapidly, these people would have much better jobs and much higher salaries, and they would be much happier than they are at the moment. And the final one was our post capitalist system of creditism requires credit growth to survive. So if the government is financing these investments on a multi trillion dollar scale, it's going to make credit expand, and that's going to keep the economy expanding. So yes, it would solve all four of those problems.
Keith Weinhold 26:35
One of those four problems is the debt and the deficit. I want to dive into that more with Richard as it becomes more and more problematic in the United States, and just how far we can kick this can down the road. You're listening to get rich education. We're talking with macro economist Richard Duncan. More, we come back. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold.
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Jim Rickards 28:40
this is Author Jim Rickards. Listen to get rich education with Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your Daydream.
Keith Weinhold 28:55
Welcome back to get rich education. We are going big this week, talking about the global economy, although mostly centered on the United States, with macroeconomist Richard Duncan. You can learn more about him at RichardDuncaneconomics.com and Richard I want to talk about the debt in the deficit. The debt is the United States overall debt as it accumulates year after year, and the deficit is just the annual thing, and it's so interesting and concerning. When I look at this, when you look at the line items in the United States government's annual spending, we now see that interest payments are taking the second largest chunk, only to Social Security. Social Security's number one interest is the second biggest expense, even more than defense spending and on Medicare. So I just wonder, as I see the interest payments going up and up and up and projected to be our greatest expense every year. You know, one thing I think about Richard is when our interest payments alone exceed our. Revenue somewhere down the road, is that when it's game over, or is that when we're on the way to game over? So can you talk to us about really, where the concern crops up with the deficit, like I talked about, and with the debt that's now at about $36 trillion
Richard Duncan 30:17
deficit and debt is a real problem. It was the first problem that I mentioned when we kicked off the conversation. There are two components of that. One is the fact that government debt has been increasing very rapidly. At the end of 2007 total government debt was around $9 trillion by 2014 it had doubled to $18 trillion because the government had to respond to the collapse of the private sector in 2008 and prevent us from having a great depression at that time, and then after 2014 it has doubled again, from 18 trillion to $36 trillion now, much of that was due to the need for the government to keep us from having another Great Depression during COVID When government stimulus amounted to about $5 trillion and the Fed created a similar amount over just a two year period. So now we have a much higher level of government debt. But the second component of that is that interest rates are very much higher than they used to be. The federal funds rate went up from 0% a few years back to a high of five and a quarter, actually a range between five and a quarter and five and a half. And recently, the Fed cut the federal funds rate by 50 basis points. But you can still say it is 4.9% let's call it 4.9% so interest rates are far higher than they used to be, but they don't have to remain high. The reason interest rates went up is because the Fed increased the federal funds rate. And the reason the Fed increased the federal funds rate is because we had high rates of inflation. Inflation peaked at 9% or so in 2022 but most recently, the CPI has come back down to 2.4% and the Fed's favorite measure of inflation, that PCE Price Index, has come down to 2.2% and that means that the federal funds rate, which is 4.9% is more than twice as high as the inflation rate is. That shows us that we have very tight monetary policy, and the Fed should be able to reduce interest rates very rapidly going forward. They've told us in their dot plot projections that they expect that interest rates will end this year the federal funds rate at 4.4% and then in next year, at 3.4% and 2026 at 2.9% so that reduction in interest rates will bring down the cost of the total interest expense that you mentioned as being so high currently, the risk, however, is that we get a rebound in inflation. We're inflation to surge again, then interest rates won't come down. In fact, they could go higher. So all of my career, more or less, has been spent in Asia. And the main theme that is run through the global economy, the development of the global economy over the last three and a half decades has been globalization, globalization in the form of us running very large trade deficits with other countries. Literally, the US current account deficit since the early 1980s has been $15 trillion meaning countries with the trade surpluses have had a $15 trillion trade surplus, and that's why they've all been transformed economically as a result of their trade surplus with the US, but what the US got out of this was the ability to buy things made with very low cost labor, and that was extremely disinflationary, that drove down the inflation rate in the US, and that allowed interest rates in the US to come down to very low levels that we've seen during most of this century, Up until the time COVID started. The real danger is now, if we do impose very high trade tariffs on China and our other trading partners, then that will cause a very serious spike in inflation. And it won't just be one off, because, of course, when the tariffs are put in place, that will immediately cause everything to be that much more expensive. The US companies importing goods from abroad would have to pay that tariff, then those US companies would pass those higher expenses on to the consumers, so we'd get an immediate spike in inflation. But that would also mean that the companies abroad it wouldn't be so profitable for them to have their manufacturing facilities abroad, they would try to bring those back home. And given that the unemployment rate in the US is so low already, only 4.1% there's not enough labor to allow these manufacturing facilities to come back to the US and start producing goods in the US. So that would cause an upward spiral. In wages and the wage push inflation spiral of the type that we had in the late 1960s and early 1970s so that is a In other words, tariffs would put an end to globalization, and that would cause a such a severe spike in inflation and interest rates, it would essentially be the death nail for creditism, which requires credit growth to survive. The end of globalization would mean this end of this 30 year global economic boom that the world has enjoyed, and therefore it is a very severe threat, and it would push up the interest expense of the US government, which you let off with, instead of lower interest rates, bringing down the interest expense the government has to pay every year, we would have instead higher interest rates, which would make the amount that the government has to pay on its interest even higher than it is at the moment, and make the budget deficit even larger than it is at the moment, and Make the government debt grow even faster than it's growing at the moment. So let's hope that doesn't happen. Instead, the better approach is to invest, to have the government finance large scale investments in new industries and technologies make the economy grow much more rapidly and we can grow our way out of this debt problem that we're currently in,
Keith Weinhold 36:21
yes more inflation, whether that comes from higher tarrifs or any other sources, will lead to higher interest rates to counteract that higher inflation, which will Yes, pump up the deficit in the debt that much more. And you know, one thing that I like about Richard is, you know, a lot of people complain about things, or say, what are we going to do? Or Things look bad, and Richard is saying some of that, but he offers a way forward with the US sovereign wealth fund, like he talked about before, investing our way out of it. So Richard, if we don't invest in this debt and deficit situation gets worse. It could be a hard question to answer, but I'd like your best guess at how far can we kick the can down the road? When is it game over? How big do our interest payments on the debt and deficit have to get?
Richard Duncan 37:10
the game is never over. No matter how bad things become, humanity will survive and carry on. So even in the Great Depression, people made it through, even through World War Two that resulted, largely as a result of the Great Depression. A lot of people died. 60 million people died, but the game didn't end. So regardless of how bad the economic system system were to become, humanity will survive and there will be a solution. Now, a lot of people put forward that, the idea that they point out that we have this high level of government debt, and their solution is to reduce government spending. The government spends something like $6.8 trillion last year. That was the amount the government spent. The budget deficit last year was 1.8 trillion so in order to eliminate the budget deficit, the government would have to spend $1.8 trillion less. In other words, it would have to cut its spending by 27% but the government cut its spending by 27% they're going to happen. The economy would immediately spiral into a depression. So even that reduction in spending wouldn't balance the budget, because the government revenues would collapse, and they would have even fewer tax revenues, so the deficit would still be there, the economy would collapse, and the unemployment rate would be 20 plus percent, and would just fall further behind China and be at greater risk from a national security perspective, and much more miserable As a society overall. That's why it's always say people should consider think of the words austerity and death at the same time, because austerity would bring about the collapse of our economic system and the Great Depression unless your civilization would survive it. trying to answer your question more directly, how high could this go? Well, governments don't default on their debt when push comes to shove. If the government's having a hard time paying interest on its debt, the Fed will just print more money. And in a case where between 2008 and 2014 when the Fed created three and a half trillion dollars, they printed a lot of money at that short space of time, and they got away with it without having high rates of inflation. The highest rate of inflation we had during that period was 3.8% in 2011 and by the early months of 2015 we had deflation again for a few months. Prices actually fell negative CPI for a few months in 2015 so if we have a global economy, as we do at the moment, full of we have nearly 8 billion people, I would guess 2 billion of them at least live on less than $5 a day. So the US could get away with having a lot of paper money printing without having higher, very high rates of inflation and the government could finance itself that way for quite a long time. Of course, if we have a closed domestic economy brought about by extremely high tariff barriers, then we would end up with hyperinflation in the United States. But even with hyperinflation, it would be very painful for people who have all their cash in the bank or under their mattress, but people with assets, those asset prices would appreciate more or less in line with the inflation, and it would erode the government debt relative to the size of the economy, because the GDP would grow in nominal terms very rapidly because of the hyperinflation, and the debt, which is not inflation adjusted, would be evaporated away by the inflation.
Keith Weinhold 40:43
right? that's why here at GRE we are all invested and aimed toward prudent use of leverage with assets like real estate and we sure have been the beneficiaries of that wave of inflation that followed COVID there. Richard, well, we're talking about the debt and the deficit somewhat, which, interestingly, has actually doubled since the first time you were here on the show. When you were here, 10 years ago, it was at 18 trillion, and today it's at 36 trillion. We talked about, how far can you kick the can down the road back then? Well, here we are, 10 years later, and it's doubled. Talk to us. You know, you talked previously about the greatest risk to the United States economy. Tell us now, as we are investors here on this show, about the greatest risk to the real estate and stock market, I would just say within the next year. What are some of those risks to those particular markets?
Richard Duncan 41:38
We've already discussed the main risk that high tariffs would potentially cause a new spike of inflation and force the Fed to hike interest rates rather than cutting interest rates. But there are some other risk as well. One is the fact that we already have a very high level of wealth relative to income. Let me back up a second. You were talking about debt doubling since we first spoke 10 years ago. Here's another statistic for you. Just in the last four and a half years, the total wealth of the Americans, all of their assets minus all of their liabilities. In other words, household sector net worth. Since the end of 2019 it has increased by $47 trillion in four and a half years. That's about a 40% increase. Now, $47 trillion is enough to pay off the entire US government tip, which we've been worrying about with $11 trillion left over. So not everything is as bleak as it sounds on the surface. We've had a huge explosion of wealth in the last four and a half years that's been driven by property and also by stocks. The problem now is, is that the level of income the asset prices, are very inflated relative to their historic norms. And one of the ratios that I always keep an eye on is called the wealth to income ratio. It takes the household sector net worth. In other words, the wealth that we were just discussing, which, by the way, is now $164 trillion of wealth owned by the Americans. The wealth divided by income, disposable personal income, this wealth to income ratio is now an extraordinarily high level. The ratio is 785% whereas the average of that ratio going back to 1950 has been 550% the previous two peaks were in the year 2000 when it hit 620 during the NASDAQ bubble, and then that bubble popped, and the stock market crashed, and we had a recession, and it went back to 550 and then it surged to a new peak of 680 during the property bubble. And then that bubble popped, and we almost went into a depression, and that a lot of wealth was destroyed. We had a severe recession. The government had to bail us out from and that ratio went back to 550 again. Now it is just off the charts relative to its previous peaks, because people 680 now it's 785 so people used to suggest that higher asset prices were justified because interest rates were near 0% but even after the Fed hiked interest rates from near 0% to about 5% The asset prices have stayed inflated. That does suggest that asset prices are very inflated and therefore very vulnerable to any sort of shock that could occur, whether geopolitical or economic or domestic political problems. So that's a concern. Another concern is quantitative tightening is still occurring. Quantitative tightening is the opposite of quantitative easing. When, with quantitative easing, the Fed creates money and pumps it into the financial markets, and that tends to make asset prices go up, and it also tends to make interest rates on government debt stay low, because if it pushes up bond prices, it pushes down. Bond yields. Well, now the opposite is occurring. Over the last two years, the Fed has destroyed roughly $2 trillion it created $5 trillion from the end of 2019 till about 2022 during the COVID pandemic, and the policy response to that, the Fed created $5 trillion but now it's destroyed 2 trillion of that five that it created, and is still destroying dollars at the rate of about $60 billion a month, or $700 billion a year. And as it does, as it destroys dollars, it takes dollars out of the financial system, which all other things being the same, tends to make financial conditions tighter, putting upward pressure on bond yields and downward pressure on asset prices. So as this continues, this is a concern, because reduce the liquidity in the system by another $700 billion if it continues for another year, having said that there is still an enormous amount of excess liquidity in the system as a result of all of the money that the Fed has created, going back to 2008 I estimate that the excess liquidity is somewhere around three and a half trillion dollars. If you look at bank reserves and the reverse repos at the Fed is about three and a half trillion dollars of excess liquidity, and the Fed actually has to pay interest to the banks on their bank reserves to hold interest rates up. That's how the Fed controls the federal funds rate now. It pays the banks roughly right now, 4.8% interest on all of the banks bank reserves, and so the banks will not lend money to anyone at less than 4.8% interest, because the Fed will pay them 4.8% interest. Why would they lend to anyone else for less if it suddenly stopped paying interest on these bank reserves, these banks would look around and where would they invest their three and a half trillion dollars in? No one's going to pay them 4.8% or even 3.8% or 2.8% interest rates would plunge because of all the excess liquidity that exists. So this excess liquidity has been a thing that's been driving the economy since COVID started, and it's why we've managed to avoid recession, which everyone is expected to arrive any moment now for the last two and a half years. So there are concerns, but there are also, as always, other reasons for optimism.
Keith Weinhold 47:24
Well, that wealth to income ratio that Richard talked about, that's a calculation that you yourself can do. One's net worth is almost eight times their income now, which is at a historic high, which is one concerning point that Richard brought up. Well, Richard, I want you to tell us about your terrific video newsletter, macro watch unless you have any other last thoughts first.
Richard Duncan 47:51
well, just one last word on the US sovereign wealth fund. Thank you very much for giving me a chance to discuss that and to explain why both Democrats and Republicans are now in favor of establishing a US sovereign wealth fund, one of the few issues that has bipartisan support. And this must come as a surprise to many of your listeners and most Americans, in fact, why have both parties agreed on really setting up a US sovereign wealth fund? So I'm glad I've had a chance to explain it and why it's so urgently necessary. I'd just like to emphasize the extraordinary benefits that this delivers to the American people, both individually and at a national level, individually, in terms of medical breakthroughs and better health and much more rapid economic growth for the economy, so much more wealth and much more national security as well. So I hope the Americans will get on board with this idea and give it their full support, because it's exactly what our country needs to solve all the four issues, the major issues that I laid out at the beginning of this conversation. But with that said, if your listeners would like to learn more about my work, Macrowatch. Microwatch is a video newsletter. Every couple of weeks, I upload a new video discussing something important happening in the global economy and how that's likely to affect the stock market, property, currencies and commodities. They can find macro watch on my website, which is RichardDuncanEconomics.com that's RichardDuncanEconomics.com Macro Watch has been going on now for 11 years, they'll find more than 100 hours of videos in the microwatch archives. They can begin watching immediately, and they'll receive a new video every couple of weeks. And I'd like to offer your listeners a subscription discount. If they go to Richard Duncan economics.com and hit the subscribe button, they'll be prompted to put in a discount coupon code, if they put it in G, R, E, they can subscribe to macro watch at a 50% discount. That's great. That's GRE so I hope they'll check that out, and at the very least, they can sign up there for my free blog and follow my work that way.
Keith Weinhold 49:56
And I have benefited from consuming macro watch content myself over the years, allowing me to sort of stretch my thought process and go macro, which we don't always do as real estate investors. Oh, Richard, it's been valuable as always, and you really offered a solution, a way forward here, something that's really refreshing. It's been great as always, having you back on the show.
Richard Duncan 50:18
Yeah. Thank you very much. I look forward to the next time
Keith Weinhold 50:21
me too. when it comes to the term capitalism, if that's truly a system that we're no longer in, you know, it seems to get replaced with the word meritocracy, and that is a word that I like, meritocracy, where producers get rewards for being productive, but even that is under attack, and the government just always seems to be stepping in with a safety net. Seemingly everywhere you look, it won't let banks fail. We saw them jump in early last year with Silicon Valley Bank and other bank failures, the government won't let homeowners fail either. I mean, you don't have to think back very far with mortgage loan forbearance in the COVID era, on issues of the debt and deficit. Even Fed Chair Jerome Powell himself has called it unsustainable. That's the word that he used. Like Richard said today, we won't default. We'll just print more. So when it comes to the inflation versus deflation tug of war, the future keeps looking inflationary, but at what rate of inflation? That's what I don't know, and no one really knows. If you like Richard Duncan's content, and you sort of wished he and I's conversation would go on. Well, he is a regular guest here, so I expect him back. But if you're telling yourself, I want more of his content and I want to make it visual at the same time to help really bring this to life, well, visit RichardDuncanEconomics.com hit the subscribe button and get 50% off. That's five zero, 50% off with the discount code. GRE. Happy Veterans Day. Until next week, I'm your host, Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream.
Speaker 2 52:17
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Keith Weinhold 52:46
The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth, building, getricheducation.com