Spiralling Government Debt Isn’t a Choice

life expectancy alone is not enough. There has to be a suppression of degenerative diseases that currently turn the older cohort into massive consumers of resources rather than producers. Diseases that kill quickly are economically sustainable. Keeping people alive who can’t produce is economically debilitating.

At some stage, you run out of suckers to buy government debt. What is certain is we will only see more efforts at financial oppression, but we will see increasing attempts to monetize deficits and reduce the future value of liabilities through inflation. It will not be pretty.

For most of the 2020s, the driving economic force will be low growth in productivity, decreased opportunities for investment of accumulated capital, and low interest rates. It will also be a period of increasing unemployment, driven by continued decline in industry and stagnation in high tech as the result of the maturation of the core technology.

First, the world can embark on a surge in productive investment, probably but not necessarily directed by the state because the private sector might not be in a position to capture the full benefits of investment and so will not have the incentive to invest. Second, we must reduce the income share of the state and of the rich. Or third, we must acc

Every hyperinflation looked the same. “Hyperinflations are always caused by public budget deficits which are largely financed by money creation.” But even more interestingly, Bernholz identified the level at which hyperinflations can start. He concluded that “the figures demonstrate clearly that deficits amounting to 40 percent or more of expenditu

A country with well over 100% debt-to-GDP has two main choices in this scenario. The first choice is that they can keep interest rates very low despite periods of price inflation that occurs, and debase all of the currency holders and bond holders. Japan is far enough into fiscal dominance that they’ve chosen that route. The second choice is that t