Chris Martenson explores debt and compound interest at peakprosperity.com:
One serious predicament we face is that the current leaders in the halls of monetary and political power do not appear to understand the dimensions of our situation. The mind-boggling part about it is that the situation is easy to understand.
Our collective predicament is simply this: Nothing can grow forever.
Sooner or later, everything must cease growing, or it will exhaust its environs and thereby destroy itself. The Fed is busy doing everything in its considerable power to get credit (that is, debt) growing again so that we can get back to what it considers to be “normal.”
But the problem is – or the predicament, I should more accurately say – is that the recent past was not normal. You’ve probably all seen this next chart. It shows total debt in the U.S. as a percent of GDP:
Somewhere right around 1980, things really changed, and debt began climbing far faster than GDP. And that, right there, is the long and the short of why any attempt to continue the behavior that got us to this point is certain to fail.
It is simply not possible to grow your debts faster than your income forever. However, that’s been the practice since 1980, and every current politician and Federal Reserve official developed their opinions about ‘how the world works’ during the 33-year period between 1980 and 2013.
Put bluntly, they want to get us back on that same track, and as soon as possible. The reason? Because every major power center, be that in D.C. or on Wall Street, tuned their thinking, systems, and sense of entitlement during that period. And, frankly, a huge number of financial firms and political careers will melt away if/when that credit expansion finally stops.
To continue reading: Money Under Fire
“With just one caveat: I’ve been assuming that dollars remain valuable.”
The above sentence is after the last chart which shows the debt increasing 3X to $185 trillion. If the dollar becomes 1/2 as valuable, what happens to the debt number–i.e. is it doubled, is another number, is not affected, or who knows?