Australia’s Debt Is Never Going To Be Repaid. By Philip Barton.

Add $975 billion by governments (federal, state and territory) as their response to WuFlu.

That is a total of, near enough, $10 trillion.

There are 13.1m employed Australians (of a total of almost 26 million), so the total debt is $763 k per working person. Average earnings are now a touch over $90 k per year.

Does anybody seriously believe that this can ever be paid back?

All debts are eventually settled — either by re-payment or default.

Australia too has crossed the Rubicon, where the debt is never going to repaid in a meaningful way (that is, where the dollar is worth about what it is today).

The US crossed that river decades ago. The unfunded liabilities of the US Government, for instance, are generally reckoned to be in the vicinity of US$100 trillion, or about US$2 million per worker. Way beyond repayment.

Then there’s the covid response and the spreading attitude of MMT. Sven Henrich:

The amount of liquidity pumped into the markets and the economy in the last year dwarfs anything we’ve seen in history.

In the US alone 55% of GDP, $12.3 trillion in just 13 months. There is no precedence for this. None. And consider the context: By the end of this year US [Federal Government] debt will stand at $30 trillion up from $10 trillion in 2008. 66% of the US’s entire historical debt load will have been added in just 13 years. …

Keep dreaming it’s all consequence free.

All that perpetual debt gives governments a huge incentive to keep interest rates near zero. But low interest rates and easy money since 1982 has in turn caused the biggest asset bubble ever:

The whole world has the loosest financial conditions ever.

I maintain the Fed is playing with fire and in their arrogance they are way too confident with their talk of “tools” to be able to contain inflation.

It’s coming to a head “soon”. If we are lucky, it will only be a 1970s style inflation.