A Letter of Apology

This is a letter of apology… though the risk is that it becomes an “I told you so.”

I met a retiree named LeDonna last weekend at International Living’s Ultimate Go Overseas Bootcamp in Tampa. She stopped by my table to tell me that my writing scares her, and that I keep her up at night, worried about what’s to come for America, the American economy, and American families.

I really do not intend to scare anyone.

I’m not writing a horror movie.

It’s more like the prequel to the documentary some Ken Burns-type will release in the 2030s to explain—through old photos and newsreels—how it is that America allowed this to happen… how the dollar’s reserve status created then destroyed the middle class… how politicians going back to the 1980s began to rely on debt to artificially grow the economy…

So many missteps all along the way.

But I don’t want to scare you or LeDonna.

I share what I share not to scare but to explain why you should prepare.

All last weekend, Bootcamp attendees were approaching me after my presentations to say some version of, “Now I understand! I didn’t really see it before. But the way you laid it out—connecting the dots—I get it. And I’m not happy.”

None of us are happy.

Because it didn’t have to be this way.

We didn’t have to end up here, in a no-win situation where the only legitimate option is a financial reset of some kind.

We’re here because every politician over the last 40-plus years walked into DC promising to be a budget hawk, to make sure Uncle Sam stopped his spending bender, and none of them lived up to their promise.

They were doves cosplaying as hawks.

Somewhere there are milk cartons in America advertising missing backbones.

To his credit, Clinton balanced the budget four consecutive years and created a surplus in fiscal year 1998, the first surplus since 1969. And we threw away that discipline the minute Baby Bush took office… and it’s been downhill ever since, and at an increasingly faster pace.

Fiscal 2026 started last October with the expectation that the federal deficit (federal overspending) was pegged at about $1.9 trillion, with interest costs on US debt expected to hit $952 billion.

We are now in the final weeks of fiscal year 2026. It ends Sept. 30. The deficit will exceed $2.1 trillion, while interest expense will now come in at $1.25 trillion.

All those billions of extra dollars come out of thin air. They’re just conjured up, created from nothing with a computer keystroke.

And America sinks ever deeper into the financial morass…

Which is why I repeatedly told those in attendance in Tampa that what’s coming isn’t me guessing at the future. I didn’t whip out a Magic 8 Ball or a crystal ball from some voodoo priestess’s going-out-of-business sale…

I simply listened…

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has spent the past year telegraphing in fragmented bits a consistent message that there’s a necessary restructuring to come. As he told Bloomberg just before Trump tapped him to head the Treasury Department: “I could see in the next few years that we are going to have to have some kind of grand global economic reordering”—potentially along the lines of the 1944 Bretton Woods framework that established the dollar as global reserve currency.

In May, he argued in a speech at the Reagan National Economic Forum that America needs:

Safer supply chains. More secure medicines. More reliable access to critical minerals. A revived maritime capacity. A financial system aligned with national purpose. And trading partnerships that reinforce, rather than undermine, our security relationships.

All well and good. Some real value propositions in that.

However, those don’t manifest quietly behind the scenes. They rip up the script.

It’s that ripping that keeps LeDonna awake.

Because the new script, as promising as it might be, demands a lot of painful rewriting of the life American families know as normal today.

And that is what you have to prepare for.