Sheldon Filger-blogger for GlobalEconomicCrisis.com

The supposed raison d’être of the Biden presidency was defined by its political allies and media supporters as  a “return to normality” after the 4-year administration of former president and major-league disruptor Donald Trump.  Now that the Biden administration has been in office for 2-months. what is the  scorecard?

Problematic, for 3 major reasons, all interconnected:

1. Unprecedented rise in the national debt The passage of the latest Covid relief bill, following in the wake of earlier bills Congress approved during the last months of the Trump administration, have skyrocketed the U.S. national debt at a level never before seen. The stimulus package approved during the Obama-Biden administration following the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09 is trivial in comparison. The latest package adds $1.9 trillion to the already staggering growth in the nation’s sovereign debt during the course of a single year. Defenders of the Biden administration claim that there should be no concern. Other indicators provide a different answer. Rising 10-year bond yields, the growing disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street and other factors point to a growth of future inflationary trends and expectations. Should inflation become realized at  higher rates than the past 15 years. the growth in debt servicing costs for the U.S. Treasury may break the U.S. Federal Budget in future years.
2. Breakdown of control on the Southern border. The Biden administration has undone most of his predecessor’s border control policies. The result is a rise in massive, uncontrolled immigration from impoverished and violence-stricken Latin American countries, outside the legal process. This development has the potential to promote domestic instability in a country already stricken with a partisan divide characterized by growing mutual hostility.

3.Worsening international relations. In particular, President Biden  and his policymakers and advisors have exacerbated the already inharmonious relations that existed between Washington and its  two major global adversaries; Russia and China. The most recent  example was President Biden’s public comment that Putin was a “killer.” This needlessly hostile name-calling directed at the head of state of a major power possessing a nuclear arsenal equal to that of the U.S. was stunning. The supposedly more polished and experienced Biden, often contrasted as such with Trump, engaged in the type of  verbal insults and bullying expected at a schoolyard scrap, not from mature and professional policymakers. That such amateurish behavior has already occurred so early in the Biden presidency points to the likelihood of a worsening of bilateral relations between the U.S. and Russia, and probably a similar trend with China.

The above three factors are interconnected. They  points  to the United States, under the auspices of the Biden administration, engaging  in policies that are fiscally, domestically and geopolitically highly destabilizing. This makes a global economic depression a far more likely event in the near future.

In the 2-year period between 2008 and 2010 something peculiar happened to the U.S. Federal Budget. In 2008 the Federal Government in the United States spent $253 billion on interest  incurred by the national debt, representing  8.5 % of all federal outlays. Over the next two years federal budget deficits skyrocketed due to stimulus  and other fiscal programs undertaken in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Obviously, massive deficit spending  greatly increased the national debt. However, instead of the expected increase in annual interest payments, the amount allocated for debt interest payments by the Federal Government actually declined to $196 billion, representing  only 5.7% of the Federal budget, a sharp decline from only two years previously.

How was this seemingly impossible mathematical trick accomplished? The answer is surreal in its simplicity. The Federal Reserve, by monetizing the debt and exercising other monetary levers at  its disposals, sharply reduced interest rates across the board. In the case of short term interest rates, they were in some cases reduced to virtually zero ; in essence, free money.  It is only for that reason that interest paid on the national debt plunged while the overall debt ballooned due to continuous  and massive deficit spending.

Will the incoming Biden administration be so lucky? Unlikely. After massive deficit spending in President Trump’s final year in office, primarily due to a Coronavirus relief bill  that increased borrowing by more than $2 trillion dollars on top of the already large structural deficit, a President Biden is set to add a new and even larger Covid stimulus  relief package during his first year in office. So clearly, the national debt will continue to grow at a rapid rate.

What about interest rates? If it could, the Fed would keep interest rates at zero almost forever. But it  can’t. On the horizon are warning signs of high inflation. In the period after the Global Financial Crisis low inflation enabled central banks worldwide to prime the pump and run the printing presses. This time there is decoupling of major trading relationships: U.S. and China; U.K. and Eurozone. As  supply chains fragment, costs will be driven  upwards. Furthermore, there exist geopolitical tensions that threaten to drive up commodity prices, should they worsen. Political instability within  the United States itself creates elevated risks, which in turn stimulate inflationary pressures.

Any meaningful uptick in the  rate of inflation will compel central banks, including the Federal Reserve, to begin raising interest  rates. Once that happens, the massive deficit spending of the Biden administration that is now projected will unleash a sovereign debt trap, condemning the American and other economies, large and small, to stagflation, meaning higher inflation and a highly depressed economy. The handwriting is on the wall. In a worst case scenario, the U.S. government will default on its national debt, with seismic repercussions. Alternatively, the Biden administration could attempt to reduce the national debt through hyperinflation, which will  induce it s own calamitous impact on the nation’s social stability.

Sheldon Filger-blogger for GlobalEconomicCrisis.com

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

Economics is a social science, not an exact science.  Theories on how a nation’s economy and financial system should function  proliferate the body politic, ranging from Reagonomics to Keynesian pump-priming. However, as the past year’s global economic crisis has demonstrated, dogmas and theories, such as market fundamentalism, are largely impotent in the face of brutal economic realities. It was not out of conformity with a particular economic dogma, but rather sheer panic, which drove  key policymakers in major advanced and developing economies throughout the world to plunge their nations into unprecedented levels of public debt, all in a frantic effort aimed at halting the free fall collapse of the global financial system that had erupted after the downfall of the investment bank Lehman Brothers.

One year later, throughout the world and especially in the United States, political decision makers are proclaiming to their constituents that the worst of the economic crisis is behind us, “green shoots,” in the words of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, are starting to emerge, and the stock market has regained much of its losses. Yet, as Wall Street awards record bonuses to many of its stakeholders, unemployment in the U.S. and other developed countries continues to rise, while the credit crunch constricts small and medium size businesses. Amid the contradictory images regarding the Great Recession, I have written “Global Economic Forecast 2010-2015:Recession Into Depression,” http://www.createspace.com/3403422 , in which I look at the likely economic trends over the next 5 years. As the title suggests, my projection is not an optimistic one.

While the trillions of dollars poured into the global financial system by the United States and other sovereigns did prevent a total financial collapse in late 2008, this achievement has not come without a high cost, and growing danger.  The level of public debt being accumulated by governments across the globe in response to the global economic crisis, and especially in the U.S., will reach a point of unsustainability, likely by 2012. This will occur simultaneously with continuing high rates of unemployment, which equates with weak consumer demand. The United States is dependent on the American consumer for at least 70% of GDP output. Overleveraged and underemployed consumers dampen growth prospects and  retard government tax revenues. While public finances remain weak, policymakers will likely maintain stimulus spending programs, which translates into structural mega-deficits. The Congressional Budget Office is currently projecting a $9 trillion deficit over the next decade; based on the CBO’s past record, this is likely a lowball estimate.

In my look at the probable economic trajectory for the U.S. and other major economies over the next five years, I had to confront the strong possibility that amid America’s growing fiscal imbalance, there exists a serious danger of future shocks to the global financial system, which may possibly rival the implosion of the investment banks which occurred in 2008. During the next two years, $2 trillion in commercial real estate loans will come due. These were loans initiated when commercial properties were at their peak valuation, and largely securitized, as was the case with subprime loans that triggered the financial crisis in 2008. Should a commercial real estate implosion replicate the carnage that the banking system experienced in 2008, how will sovereign governments, the United States in particular, find the money to finance another financial system bailout? My conclusion is that it will not be mathematically possible for the U.S. and other governments to sustain a future rescue of the banking system. In essence, sovereign  governments will become overwhelmed with public debt, reaching a point of fiscal collapse. The result will be sovereign insolvency, leading to a synchronized global depression.

In his farewell address to the nation in January 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned his countrymen about the long-term consequences of soaring public debt. Mortgaging the assets of future generations, Eisenhower believed, could transform today’s democracy into tomorrow’s “insolvent phantom.” In the midst of our current economic crisis, it would be wise to pay heed to the sage advice that President Eisenhower offered nearly half a century ago.

In addition to the $750 billion TARP program to bailout banks and Wall Street that was approved last October by Congress, untold trillions of dollars have been provided or promised to the financial industry by Treasury and the Federal Reserve, off the books of the official budget. A most recent estimate puts this figure up to $13 trillion, nearly equal the entire GDP of the United States. The official national debt of the U.S. now tops $11 trillion, and may surpass the GDP within two years. In addition, state, county and local governments across the country are sinking into an ocean of red ink. In effect, the entire credit worthiness of the United States has become the “lender of last resort” for the “too big to fail” entities. The financial elites of America are no doubt uncorking their champagne bottles, as their privileged excesses are held whole through the ultimate backstop; the indebtedness of not only the current generation of Americans, but also their children and perhaps even their grandchildren. It appears that the oligarchs are so devoid of historical understanding, they fail to recognize that this subsidization of their Wall Street empire of credit default swaps and gargantuan compensation packages can only be sustained if the United States can forever go into debt. And in order to believe that the U.S. is ultimately “too big to fail,” they have to be equally ignorant of basic mathematics, the ultimate irony for the supposed magicians of high finance.

But what if a point is reached when the rest of the world is no longer willing to lend its scarce capital to the United States, and subsidize its Wall Street bailouts and extravagant military industrial complex? No doubt, the oligarchs would then use their political muscle to enact higher taxation on middle income Americans. This may come in the form of higher consumption taxes; however, a growing possibility is the hidden tax of inflation. A dirty secret that is increasingly being discussed by economists in quiet corners is that there is no way the United States can possibly pay for the servicing of its massive, expanding national debt without resorting to inflation.

What the financial and political elites have not analyzed are the consequences for America’s social cohesion and viability should the nation’s exploding debt burst beyond the point of containment. For unlike AIG, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the United States does not have the option of calling upon others to rescue it from its own excesses, with the justification being that it is “too big to fail.”

It strikes me that most Americans, not only the financial elites but across the nation’s social fabric, have a distorted image of how their country fits in with the rest of the world amid the Global Economic Crisis. In a chilling parallel to our times, Amalrik writes about the paralysis of isolation as a factor that would eventually bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1970 he wrote, “This isolation has created for all—from the bureaucratic elite to the lowest social levels—an almost surrealistic picture of the world and of their place in it. Yet the longer this state of affairs helps to perpetuate the status quo, the more rapid and decisive will be its collapse when confrontation with reality becomes inevitable.”