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The End Of Cheap Debt: The Fall & Rise Of Interest Rates
Total debt (public + private) in America is currently at a staggering $67 trillion.
That number has been rising fast over the past 47 years, following the US dollar’s transformation into a fully-fiat currency in August of 1971.
Perhaps this wouldn’t be such a big concern were America’s income, measured by GDP, growing at a similar rate. But it’s not.
Growth in debt has far outpaced GDP, as evidenced by this chart:
In 1971, the US debt-to-GDP ratio was 1.48x. That’s roughly the same multiple it had averaged over the prior century.
But today? That ratio has spiked to to 3.47x, more than doubling over just 4 decades.
There are many troubling conclusions to draw from this, but here’s a simple way to look at it: It’s taking more and more debt to eke out a unit of GDP growth.
Put in other words: the US economic engine is seizing up, requiring increasingly more effort to function.
At some point — quite possibly some point soon — the economy will no longer be able to grow because all of its output must be used to service the ballooning debt load rather than future investment.
Accelerating this point of reckoning are two major recent trends: rising interest rates and the end of global QE.
Why? Because much of the recent explosion in debt has been fueled by central bank policy:
- Interest rates have been on a steady decline since the 1980s, making debt increasingly cheaper to issue and to service.
- Since 2008, central banks have been voracious buyers of debt. Countries/companies have been able to borrow $trillions, enabled (both directly and indirectly) by these “buyers of last resort”.
But both of those trends are ending, fast.
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