$4.8 trillion – Interest on U.S. debt

Those making policy decisions still keep going on about the danger of deflation meanwhile central bankers continue to print money and governments continue to go further and further into debt.

What they fail to realise is you can not solve a problem caused by easy money with more easy money. They will only ultimately devalue the currency and cause high inflation.

Some are expecting the US debt to grow by $9 trillion over the next decade and over half of that amount is forecast to be interest. The expression when you find yourself in a hole stop digging comes to mind. Unfortunately all politicians are interested in short term results to garner votes.

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Here’s a new way to think about the U.S. government’s epic borrowing: More than half of the $9 trillion in debt that Uncle Sam is expected to build up over the next decade will be interest.

More than half. In fact, $4.8 trillion.

If that’s hard to grasp, here’s another way to look at why that’s a problem.

In 2015 alone, the estimated interest due – $533 billion – is equal to a third of the federal income taxes expected to be paid that year, said Charles Konigsberg, chief budget counsel of the Concord Coalition, a deficit watchdog group.

On the bright side – such as it is – the record levels of debt issued lately have paid for stimulus and other rescue programs that prevented the economy from falling off a cliff. And the money was borrowed at very low rates.

But accumulating any more interest on what the United States owes at this point is like extreme sport: dangerous.

All the more so because interest rates will rise when private sector borrowers return to the debt market and compete with the government for capital. At that point, the country’s interest payments could jack up very fast.

“When interest rates rise even a small amount, the interest payments go up a lot because of the size of the debt,” Konigsberg said.

The Congressional Budget Office, which made the $4.8 trillion forecast, already baked some increase in rates into the cake. But there is always a chance those estimates may prove too conservative.

And then it’s Vicious Circle 101 – well known to anyone who has gotten too into hock with Visa and MasterCard.

The country depends heavily on borrowing to fund what it wants to do. But the more debt it racks up, the more likely it becomes that creditors could demand a higher interest rate for making new loans to the government.

Here is a similar story about Britains debt problem

OECD warns Britain risks ‘debt spiral’

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said that even if Britain reduces its deficit in line with other leading nations, it will still have the rich world’s biggest deficit from now until 2017 and potentially beyond, casting serious doubt on its economic credibility.

The warning coincided with shock public finance statistics showing that public borrowing in October was 88 times what it was in the same month last year, making it likely that the Chancellor will miss his £175bn borrowing forecast this year.

The double blow is acutely embarrassing for Downing Street, coming ahead of next month’s pre-Budget report and only 24 hours after it pledged to create a Bill to halve the deficit within four years and to reduce debt every year for the coming decade.

In fact, the OECD predicted in its annual Economic Outlook, Britain’s deficit was likely to be even higher next year than this year, at 13.3pc, raising the prospect that the Government could break its own law in its very first year.

Britain’s deficit will remain higher than any other major country, including even Iceland and Ireland, unless the Government takes far more drastic action to repair it, said the OECD’s acting chief economist Jørgen Elmeskov.

“Halving the deficit would be a start, but since the UK is starting out from a deficit which is in double figures, one should go further still,” he said. “The concern is that there could be a cost spiral – where debt increases, hitting confidence in the market, which pushes up interest rates, and this leads to even higher deficits.”

The prospect of interest payments on Britain’s rapidly growing debt rising to 12pc of tax revenues has already prompted Standard & Poor’s to issue a warning about the security of the UK’s credit rating

It would seem it really is a race to the bottom for both the $ and the £

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