In the year 2000, as George W. Bush assumed the role of 43rd president of the United States, America’s national debt stood at $ 5.7 trillion, while the annual GDP was $10.7 trillion. Now, fourteen years later, with the U.S. GDP standing at $16.2 trillion, the gross national debt exceeds $17.5 trillion. The numbers are so massive, they numb our consciousness and render America’s fiscal reality incomprehensible. Thus explains the lack of public arousal over the size of the country’s federal government debt. What cannot be understood-or explained- is deemed irrelevant to the public at large. After all, what impact could the nation’s archaic fiscal bookkeeping have in the lives of the average citizen?

History, however, teaches a very different lesson. The historical record on the rise and fall of major powers reveals more often than not that the sovereign’s fiscal insolvency is more likely to lead to its demise than military defeat. Witness the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the British and French empires in the last half of the twentieth century.

A look at the statistics of the U.S. national debt tells a story of fiscal nirvana. Between  2000 and 2014 America’s GDP grew, in nominal terms, by 51 percent. In that same period, the national debt increased by more than 200 percent.  In other words, during the past decade and a half, the U.S. national debt has grown at four times the rate of its national economy. This would appear to be an unsustainable expansion of the national debt, yet there appears to be no obvious signs of economic or financial crisis afflicting the nation, despite the clear fiscal trajectory.

Appearances are deceiving, owing to a unique institution, the Federal Reserve, and equally unique status of the American dollar as the  global reserve currency. The unprecedented interventions  enacted by the Federal Reserve since the onset of the global financial and economic crisis in 2008, including quantitative easing and debt monetization, have had the effect of artificially depressing interest rates the U.S. Treasury pays on its debt instruments. At times, America’s bonds have sold widely on the global debt market, despite paying near zero interest rates. To put this monetary and fiscal alchemy into perspective, in 2000 the U.S. made $362 billion in interest payments; the figure for 2013 was $415 billion, despite the national debt that year being three times larger than in 2000. Factoring in the growth in the federal budget over that same period, the proportion of federal outlays devoted to debt servicing costs in 2013 was actually significantly lower than was the case in 2000.

What this all means is that the United States has no fiscal problem, as long as the Federal Reserve can maintain artificially low interest rates in perpetuity. Failing that, when interest rates return to normal levels, America’s fiscal reality will become mathematically unsustainable, leading to a profound budgetary crisis. When that happens cannot be predicted, but it is a matter of metaphysical certainty that it will, and when that dreaded day occurs, it will be beyond the capacity of Washington’s policymakers, including the Federal Reserve, to conjure up a solution devoid of pain.

If Hillary Clinton runs for President of the United States  in 2016, see the video about the book that warned back in 2008 what a second Clinton presidency would mean for the USA:

CLICK ON IMAGE TO VIEW VIDEO Hillary Clinton Nude

About four years into the supposed end of the Great Recession,  the proclaimed recovery of the U.S. economy remains one that is largely jobless, as well as being artificially goosed and propped up by massive bouts of monetary stimulus, known as quantitative easing, by the Federal Reserve. Thus, the April jobs report has been heralded as great news by pundits, claiming that the American economy that month created 288,000 net new jobs, and that the official unemployment rate has declined to 6.3 percent. Sounds like good economic news-but not so fast.

The economics correspondent for the British newspaper The Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, has waded into the details of official employment and workplace participation statistics in the United States, and found that in fact the non-farm workforce in the U.S. actually declined by 806,00 in April and overall labor participation in the U.S. has declined to a miserable 62.8 percent of the population. Thus, it is able-bodied men and women who have left the labor force due to discouragement that has driven down the unemployment rate, and not new job creation. The U.S. economy, which officially grew by a measly 0.1 percent in the last quarter (essentially no-growth),  is still dependent on massive monetary stimulus and large government deficits. Meanwhile, monetary stimulus is losing its economic punch, while distorting the economy through the creation of massive asset bubbles. The Fed recognizes this, and is well into its tapering back of quantitative easing.

From every perspective, the American economy does not look nearly as good as it is being described in official circles, and ditto for much of the rest of the world, still mired in the great global economic crisis.

If Hillary Clinton runs for President of the United States  in 2016, see the video about the book that warned back in 2008 what a second Clinton presidency would mean for the USA:

CLICK ON IMAGE TO VIEW VIDEO Hillary Clinton Nude