MishTalk/Mish Shedlock/2-5-2023
“A word about owing [the national] debt to ourselves. Apparently debt does not matter because we owe it to ourselves. Ridiculous.”
USAGOLD note: As Shedlock points out, it won’t be long until interest on the national debt hits $1 trillion. To put that number into perspective, the federal government’s revenue for 2022 was $5 trillion. At $1 trillion, interest payments would consume 20% of revenue. (As an aside, government expenditures were $6.5 trillion in 2022, leaving a $1.5 trillion deficit.) Interest payments on the national debt are now $853 billion. In what might be an advanced case of wishful thinking, Janet Yellen recently told the Wall Street Journal that interest rates have indeed gone up but that the Treasury Department assumes “interest rates would move back toward more normal levels.”
Sources: St. Louis Federal Reserve [FRED], US Bureau of Economic Analysis
