The #US national #debt is now rapidly approaching $36 trillion at a rate which has been characterised by all of Washington’s official institutions, including the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board, as “unsustainable,” and where one dollar in seven of the annual federal budget is needed just to pay the interest bill.
Such metrics if applied to any other state would lead to its designation as bankrupt. But the US enjoys a unique position within world capitalism because the dollar is the global currency and therefore its debt is financed by the inflow of #capital into dollar assets from the rest of the world.
This means that ever-increasing US spending, above all on the military to finance its expanding war front, is financed by the accumulation of debt, financed by others.
But if #dollar #supremacy is in any way significantly questioned or if confidence is undermined, even well before there is any prospect of an alternate currency, then the inflated debt structure is threatened with a crash.
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