This year the US government will borrow more than a trillion dollars. This money isn’t borrowed the way you and I might borrow from a bank or other financier. Government debt has to sold in the form of bonds. That means people and agencies with money have to agree to purchase a bond today against future redemption with interest.
There are several factors at work here. The basic interest rate has been low for a very long time, so there would have to be some other good reason to buy a bond like that. The good reason has been that investing your money that way in government debt has been safer than a lot of other investments. And if you just hold your money, inflation would eat it, so it’s better to put that into some kind of investment if you don’t need it right away.
That worked for a while, but it’s not working too well now. The biggest bond buyers were countries like Japan and China, and they are actively reducing their US bond holdings. They used to have an excess of dollars to get rid of because we kept importing from them more than they bought back from us. But they are trying to get rid of those dollars other ways (like buying up real estate and facilities and businesses here in the US). Part of the problem is that every country in the world is already in deep debt themselves, just like the US (only they aren’t so profligate), plus they have too many dollars already. There are better ways to invest them. On top of that, the climate of US aggression abroad is making people look for ways to hurt us and slow down that aggression; dumping US bonds is part of that. Our pushy demand that everyone else trade in dollars was sucking up their economies and benefiting only ours.
So that means the US government has to offer those bonds at a higher rate of return to entice other investors. That means the basic interest rate on all debt in US dollars has to go up with it — the Fed has to raise the basic interest rate for all loans. We know from experience that means the stock market goes down when the interest rates go up. That’s because rising interest rates mean consumers and businesses are going to be more careful about using debt to buy stuff they need, and all the stuff we manufacture is less likely to be selling quite so fast. It slows the entire economy down and stocks are less profitable because the companies behind them will be less profitable.
Nobody can tell you when these things will be noticeable, but they will be, as sure as the earth keeps spinning in space.
I wish I could show you how this works with charts and so forth. I sincerely wish we had the time to sit down and talk about this stuff so you’ll understand it. This is what happens when there is political pressure on governments to borrow and spend more than they can grab as taxes. High taxes also crimp the economy. And you could ask any random person on the street; they could think of ways the government wastes money on things they don’t believe the government should be doing. It won’t matter whether you favor one agenda or another — the government absorbs way too much money. The lie is coming apart that stirring economic growth will cover the debt. That growth simply has not kept up with the massive over-spending.
When government inserts itself into the economy, by becoming a major conduit for spending, it distorts the natural economic activity. Worse, the government is by far the most inefficient handler of money. No collection of private or corporate entities, nor even criminal enterprise, is as wasteful as government bureaucracy. The government absorbs outright more than it passes on to others as healthy spending. It sucks down vast quantities of economic activity without putting anything back into the system. It freezes assets that can never be used for any profitable purpose.
But try to reduce government spending and the political unrest will be impossible to contain. There are too many vested interests unwilling to see the greater common good. So it’s going to break, and the really smart people figure it’s coming this year. To be more precise, it’s already broken, but the ways that we measure such things don’t yet register as broken. It’s a huge system and it won’t explode, but crumble — the millions of little breaking points won’t break all at once. By the time it’s obvious, it will be too late. Stuff has already begun to break and it will take easily the next few years for all the other parts to break down. The mass of our national political will is to play it by ear and look for the best chance to plunder. Nobody is thinking about how to actually do something in the national interest — nobody with any real power to act, that is.
We can discard “national interest” as a factor in our reckoning here. There’s no saving this country. There are plenty of helpful things we can do on a smaller scale, so if you feel called in that direction, focus on state and local. Try to rescue what you can reach. Of course, with Radix Fidem, our focus is divine justice in the first place, which in turn encourages a local focus. This is what we do by moral instinct.
We who understand Biblical Law can see how US government violates everything God intended for us. We see how reality itself is sorely abused and violated by our system of government. So reality isn’t going to tolerate this much longer; it will turn around and destroy things. This is the wrath of God justly falling on a morally degrading force too large to ignore. And if you understand how this is all wholly justified, then you are ready to see with your hearts how to pass through this time of tribulation by seizing opportunities to reveal His divine justice in how we respond to injustice and wrath.
