{"id":31575,"date":"2018-02-25T16:10:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-25T21:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31575"},"modified":"2018-02-25T16:10:16","modified_gmt":"2018-02-25T21:10:16","slug":"the-albatross-of-debt-the-stock-markets-67-trillion-nightmare-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31575","title":{"rendered":"The Albatross Of Debt: The Stock Market’s $67 Trillion Nightmare, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Albatross Of Debt: The Stock Market’s $67 Trillion Nightmare, Part 1<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

This is getting pretty ridiculous. For old times sake, we recently checked on\u00a0the Federal\u00a0debt level during the month we arrived in the Imperial City as a 24-year old eager beaver. That was June 1970 and the Federal debt held\u00a0by the public was $275 billion<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Mind you, while that number wasn’t exactly diminutive, it had taken all of 188 years<\/strong> <\/em>to accumulate. That is to say, Uncle Sam had borrowed an average of $28,000<\/strong> <\/em>per week during the 9,776 weeks<\/strong><\/em>since George Washington was\u00a0sworn in as the nation’s first president.<\/p>\n

We are ruminating about this seeming historical obscuranta because it just so happens that the US treasury this very week will be selling $258 billion<\/strong> <\/em>of government debt.<\/p>\n

That’s right. Uncle Sam’s scheduled\u00a0debt emission this week<\/strong><\/em> will\u00a0nearly equal his\u00a0cumulative borrowing during\u00a0the nation’s first 188 years and its\u00a0first 37 presidents!<\/p>\n

And, yes, there has been some considerable inflation since June 1970. And not\u00a0the least because exactly 13 months later Tricky Dick Nixon decided to pull the plug on Bretton Woods and the dollar’s anchor to\u00a0a\u00a0fixed weight of gold.<\/p>\n

Needless to say,\u00a0the financial discipline of gold-backed money during that interval of guns and\u00a0butter excess would most certainly have\u00a0triggered a recession and a\u00a0heap of inconvenience for Nixon’s\u00a01972 reelection prospects. As it happened, the American economy got\u00a0a heap of inflation and destructive financialization over the next half century, instead.<\/p>\n

Accordingly, the price level today is 5X<\/strong> <\/em>higher as measured by the GDP deflator. So in today’s dollars of purchasing power, the 1970 debt figure would be about $1.2 trillion<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Albatross Of Debt: The Stock Market’s $67 Trillion Nightmare, Part 1 This is getting pretty ridiculous. For old times sake, we recently checked on\u00a0the Federal\u00a0debt level during the month we arrived in the Imperial City as a 24-year old eager beaver. That was June 1970 and the Federal debt held\u00a0by the public was $275 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5979,2120,827,15497],"class_list":["post-31575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-contracorner","tag-david-stockman","tag-united-states","tag-us-federal-debt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31575"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31578,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31575\/revisions\/31578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}