With the meaningless focus on such distracting noise as daily POMOs, will/won't the Fed taper, how many shorts will the Fed's Markets desk squeeze today, and how massive will the second Fed housing bubble be, it is easy to lose sight of the big picture, namely just where is the debt juggernaut that is the US, heading? Conveniently, the US debt clock has a "time machine" function that extrapolates, at current rates of change, what the key metrics behind the US economic facade will look like.
So in a nutshell, on this day in 2017...
- Total debt: $22.9 trillion (assuming "normalized" 5% interest means $1.1 trillion in annual interest expense)
- GDP: $16.9 trillion
- Debt to GDP ratio: 136%
- Federal Tax Revenue: $3.3 trillion
- Federal Spending: $4.1 trillion; Federal Revenue: $3.3 trillion
- Federal Budget Deficit
- US Total Debt: $63.8 trillion (excluding unfunded liabilities)
- Total National Assets: $167.2 trillion, $508,493 assets per citizen
- Total Unfunded Liabilities: $152.4 trillion, $1,237,426 liability per taxpayer
- Consolidated total debt and unfunded liabilities: $216.2 trilllion
And so on.
The constantly updated (and very sad) picture can be found after the jump:
