40 Trillion Reasons To Own Gold
Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
It’s a great morning to crank “No Brakes” by The Offspring. Why? Because the United States government has officially blown through $40 trillion in national debt, another milestone that would almost be impressive if it weren’t so outright grotesque. Our debt machine literally has “no brakes”.
According to Treasury data, total U.S. debt crossed $40 trillion this week, only about five months after it crossed $39 trillion in March, while government spending continues to exceed revenue by more than $2 trillion annually.
Ten years ago, the debt was around $19 trillion, meaning we have managed to more than double the national credit card balance in roughly a decade. Meanwhile, interest expense has become the government’s second largest expense behind Social Security, and interest costs through the first ten months of this fiscal year were already 15% higher than during the same period last year.
In other words, the U.S.’s financial statements are starting to represent those of a third world country. And once we start buying our own bonds, the transformation will be complete.
The speed at which the odometer is turning is perhaps even more disturbing than the $40 trillion headline itself, because it took the United States 192 years to accumulate its first $1 trillion of national debt, which it finally crossed in 1981. We crossed $30 trillion in 2022, $38 trillion in October 2025, $39 trillion in March 2026 and now $40 trillion roughly five months later.
At the beginning of July, the Joint Economic Committee calculated that the debt had increased by $3.16 trillion in just the previous twelve months, equivalent to more than $8.6 billion per day and about $100,000 every second. We used to measure trillion dollar increases in generations, then we measured them in years, and now apparently we are going to measure them in months.
I also think that smug idiots who joke about the debt <cough> Krugman <cough>, dismissing it as some meaningless nominal number that simply goes up forever, are missing the most alarming part of the story...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE HERE).