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sss111

Debt as percent GDP:

2000–55%

2008–68%

2016–105%

2020–129%

2022–123%

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Much more relevant is the cost of servicing the debt which has trended down/flat over time. Recent rising interest rates will change that somewhat but I see no real area of concern.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Utqq

I see the opposite. Even if interest rates don’t rise more, we’re talking about a tripling of the service cost relative to GDP. That is going to put pressure on budgets for sure.

Where do you see a tripling? Are you mixing up the lines and their respective x-axis?

As you can see from the graph, the tripling of the debt ratio did not triple or even raise the service costs, because the debt market was absorbing debt for free or even at negative cost. The United States would have been very foolish indeed to have not borrowed under these terms.

The weighted average maturity of federal debt is less than 65 months and dropping. Only a very very small portion of the national debt is locked in for thirty years.

Good source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

I think the cost to service the loans is much more relevant: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=Utqq

The 2020 number should probably be considered an outlier, since the dramatic drop in GDP in 2020 due to the pandemic increases the ratio.

Now that GDP is recovering, we are falling back onto the trend line towards higher and higher Debt/GDP.

The 2008 number is misleading as well since some of the cost of the Iraq War wasn't considered part of the national debt for some reason. When Obama took office, a lot of the gimmicks to make the bad numbers look smaller were ended.

So a lot of ignored dollars stopped being ignored even though, in reality, nothing really changed.

Government interest payments as a percentage of revenue are much more important, because that's when governments actually default.

Making the "per year" explicit:

2000: 6.6 months

2008: 8.2 months

2016: 12.6 months

2020: 15.5 months

2022: 14.8 months

holy cow! what could possibly go wrong

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