These Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings

This is getting ugly. Quickly.

Back in August, Uncle Sam’s credit card statement showed that the heavily indebted spendthrift owed the world $37 trillion.

By the end of October, Sammy the Moocher owed $38 trillion.

For the record, that is the fastest accumulation of $1 trillion in debt in human history.

And it says nothing good about the clown car running government or about the safety of America’s greatest asset—the US dollar.

Actually it says that the dollar (or at least the version we have today) is on its way out. And it says that DC either A) doesn’t give a damn about racking up debilitating debts; or B) politicians know that a reset is the only viable option at this point and so they’re spending stupidly because they know it doesn’t matter.

Your dear scribe isn’t plugged in enough to know whether it’s A or B. So, I’ll go with C) All of the above. Politicians don’t give a damn about the debt, and never really have, despite the occasional and performative pearl-clutching-for-the-cameras that they like to do in pretending for their constituents that they’re seriously worried. And that’s because politicians, I suspect, know that the government has plans to address the debt by destroying the dollar.

What that destruction looks like… well, it could be any of numerous options. I talked about one possibility recently when I noted that the crypto-centric GENIUS Act placed into law over the summer offers DC an interesting road to debt-destruction by way of stablecoins (you can read that here, if you’re interested).

But frankly, whether the road to hell is paved with good intentions or potholes overflowing with lava is a bit like tidying up the house as a conflagration consumes it… i.e., entirely pointless.

Hell is hell. And dollar destruction is dollar destruction.

Now, I have to say that I understand people do not like to read bad things about their country or their currency. I get that. I get miffed too, when I hear Europeans and Asians and others make snide comments about America.

Facts, however, are facts. You and I can’t change those facts.

American debt is what it is. The increasingly speedy accumulation of debt is what it is. Political inaction is what it is. And global investors’ expanding worries about America’s expanding debt… well, that is was it is, too, and what it is reflects the dollar’s horrible, no good, very bad year so far (the worst year for the dollar vis-à-vis other currencies since the early 1970s).

All you and I can do is assess the facts, understand what has led us to this particular collection of facts, and then decide what, if anything, we want to do to mitigate or ignore those facts in our financial lives.

Based on what I regularly see pop up on my Twitter/X feed, too many people willingly ignore the facts.

I keep reading comments about the dollar being the strongest currency in the world (it’s not)… that the rest of the world can’t survive without dollars (it absolutely can)… that no other currency can replace the dollar (fundamentally wrong)… so just stop worrying and learn to love the dollar again.

That’s status quo thinking from people who refuse to open their mind to the possibility that life is nothing if not a game of change.

Every empire the world has known has died. Every reserve currency has died. Every political economy has died.

How is it that the dollar and the American brand of capitalism is so unique that it can buck the tides of thousands of years of history?

America, and by extension, the dollar are following every other empire that grew too large and too indebted. Empire-collapse was always the reckoning, followed quickly by the death of the local lucre as a global reserve. No one wants anything to do with you when you’re no longer what you once were.

At some point, even the strongest silverback gorilla is demoted when he’s too frail to go on as troop leader.

Silverback… greenback.

All the same really.

I’m gonna pick up with this again in an upcoming dispatch, because there’s more I want to share with you about debt and tariffs and the sad misconception that tariffs are the answer to reducing the debt.

Stay tuned…