Doug Casey on the Looming Debt Crisis and What Lies Ahead

But at this point, with government debt and spending so out of control, I think some type of default is a real risk.

As I've often said, the US dollar itself is the unbacked liability of a manifestly bankrupt government, and it's headed toward reaching its intrinsic value.

It's owed to particular people and institutions who have enabled the government to do all the destructive things that it does.

Doug Casey: People have been observing this trend since the late 1960s; the idea of the federal debt getting irredeemably out of control isn't new.

In fact, a good argument can be made that the essential tasks of government are too important to be left to the type of people who are inevitably drawn to governments.

That debt is absolutely going higher as the debt burden grows, compounded by rising long-term interest rates.

In other words, when you keep racking up debt at interest, with growing deficits every year, bankruptcy is inevitable.

On top of those things, you have to add the interest on the official national debt, which is over a trillion dollars a year.

The debt the US government has is like a 100-story building that's wobbling and is about to fall.

The other alternative is the government keeps printing dollars, leading to runaway inflation.

However, there's a very bright side to the default scenario: After a government default, all the real wealth—farms, factories, mines, buildings, technologies—would still exist.

It's criminal to impose the repayment of that debt on the next generations of unborn Americans. 

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-the-looming-debt-crisis-and-what-lies-ahead/