Gargantuan deficits become much more problematic when interest rates are rising. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:
Last Friday, September 30th 2022 was the close of the Fiscal Year for the US federal government.
If you’re not familiar with the term, the ‘Fiscal Year’ refers to the government’s official accounting period. It starts on October 1st and ends the following September 30th. And everything from the federal budget to the Supreme Court’s case schedule is based around the Fiscal Year.
So are calculations for the national debt.
And based on the figures just released, the US national debt has now reached nearly $31 trillion as of the close of the Fiscal Year last Friday.
(If you want to see the number down to the penny, it’s $30,928,911,613,306.73)
At the start of the Fiscal Year back on October 1, 2021, the national debt was $28.4 trillion. So over the course of the past twelve months, the debt increased by a whopping $2.5 trillion.
That’s the second highest annual increase in the US national debt EVER, after the $4.2 trillion increase in the 2019-2020 Fiscal Year during the pandemic.
Now, a $2.5 trillion increase in the national debt is terrible, and alarm bells should be sounding from coast to coast. But there’s actually something more worrisome going on with the debt.
Remember that whenever governments borrow money, they do so by issuing some form of government bond. A bond, just like a loan, is a type of IOU. One of the key differences, however, is that a bond is a financial security that, just like stocks, can be easily bought and sold by investors around the world.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 