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there's just a lot of little nuances here and I'm just going to tell you I'm going to delve into some of the nuances but it's not as bad as you think it is or you might think it is or you hear it is or the media tells you it is the media mostly likes to Fan fear so every month uh I do a video where I take something from my old bunkery book one of the many topics and describe what's in there but a little bit updated with uh now 15-year later data and uh what I'll speak to you about today is a perennial it's the fear that America can't handle its debt now let me just say before I go further America can handle his debt will it always be able to I don't know about that always is way out there but when we say this we're really talking about three basic forms of debt Consumer Debt corporate debt and of course government debt it seems like most of the time government that's the one people worry about the money now I'm just going to say to you and I'm not going to belabor it a lot that Consumer Debt is overall it's not better than it was a year ago but it's not much worse and it's better than it was 10 20 30 40 years ago as Government debt has risen and become a more verbal topic consumers appear to have internalize that to themselves and while Consumer Debt in absolute dollars has gone up assets for consumers have gone up faster and so the balance sheet of consumers is actually better and in that of course and this is also true for corporations in that of course there's always individual ones where that's not true there's always individuals incorporations that end up individually doing stupid stuff of almost every type but overall for corporate and for Consumer this is better than it used to be with government it's a little surprising in the way it is the gross debt that people talk about the 30 trillion dollar number 30 plus trillion dollar number is is such a big number that you know humans just really can't calibrate it in their brain very easily you you just need some kind of an extraordinary brain to calibrate 30 trillion dollars but there's just a lot of little nuances here and I'm just going to tell you I'm going to delve into some of the nuances but it's not as bad as you think it is or you might think it is or you hear it is or the media tells you it is a media mostly likes to Fan fear and I think you know that but the fact is that 30 plus trillion number is not a crucial number why because it's always true that the biggest owner of government U.S government debt is the US government itself in various forms used as sort of a savings account uh I'm not going to get into the subsets of that the biggest single one is the Federal Reserve System but the feature is it's kind of paying interest from one pocket into another pocket the net amount of debt when you get passed out is about 25 trillion it's still a big number it's still scary but media likes to use the bigger one because it's scarier still the reality of that is that that number by itself doesn't make much difference it makes a little more sense to compare that to the size of our economy GDP US GDP which is about the same amount it's about a one-to-one ratio but even that isn't service costs on the debt compared to a or b service costs on the debt compared to GDP which is our annual income how much do we have to pay on the debt compared to how much income do we have or service payments on the debt compared to government tax revenue what does the government have to pay during the recent so-called debt crisis people kept talking stupidly about the U.S government defaulting which couldn't possibly happen truly if you understand what a default is and I actually did videos on at the time the reality is defaulting means the government can't pay its interest or repay principle on the debt what I think a lot of people meant was maybe if they don't get a congressional budget passed then the government may not have all the money that it wants to spend on all the things it wants to spend it on so it might have to shut down some things call to government shutdown I know by the way we've had those many times before and whenever we have a government shutdown the government doesn't shut down it just prioritized and says these are the most important things that we can afford to keep spending on and these are the ones we can't so we stop doing those it never makes it that simple and easy to understand but that's what happens the fact is and this is the point that I'm wanting to get you to interest payments on the government debt on a monthly and annual basis are less than 10 percent of tax revenue tax revenue to the government as it stands is over 10 times the interest payments on the debt therefore they couldn't possibly default on the debt that's their first obligation to pay no matter what but be that as it may disappoint I want you to see that number a little less than 10 percent nine percent Plus is the same level it was in 1980 it's the same level it was when I was born it's the same level that it was as we were going into World War II people don't get that because they don't get the notion that a part of it is the interest rate part of it is the amount of debt and part of it is what's going on with the rest of the economy that provides the revenue that the government gets from taxing overall if you actually think of that through another way and I'm just going to make this overly simple for you overly simple think through normal income tax rates and apply that to income in a broad sense GDP which isn't perfect but it's a simple analogy and that nine plus percent number comes down to three percent which is also almost where it was exactly around 1980.
it's almost exactly where it was actually around 1960. and also at about the time of my birth what I'm wanting you to see is that while the debt number is big and scary therefore the reality of the government's ability to finance this is not so much I want you to remember that most of the time in most of your life unless you're young uh normal interest rates inflation you know would hover around numbers that are actually higher than the numbers that we have today now I'm going to make one more point I know I'm talking too long here but I'm going to make one more point and that's about inflation categorically when inflation goes up lenders demand a higher interest rate to lender they won't do it I should correct that to say it's when lenders expect inflation to stay high in the future because they're lending in the future so what does that mean well when we think about inflation we all know that we had a lot of inflation fear over the last year and long rates uh on on government bonds and other long-term debt instruments went up that peaked in October of last year and they've been down since then although not usually and the reality of inflation is interesting at this point in time because I think everybody knows the official inflation rate has been falling prices are markedly higher than they were a year and two years ago but the official inflation rate applying year over year at this moment in time has been falling in recent months quite steadily and yet is now interestingly lower than people think it is if you think about it correctly the CPI which is the way people think about it typically the Consumer Price Index is an constructed index that's not actually reflective of what any given individual does intuitively some people are doing this some people are doing that they don't get the average they get the difference of what they do and the prices of the things that they buy from the average from those of the average well what I want you to see is that if you take that CPI there's a component in there that has nothing to do with a cash transaction it's what's called imputed rent it's the analysis that the government does of what homeowners would have to pay in rent if they had to rent their house which they don't have to do because they own their house that's a component in to CPI which actually today is in rigidly not wanting to come down but doesn't actually involve a cash transaction anybody actually does and if you take it out the actual CPI then that remains of all the other components is actually only at a two percent year-over-year increase the parts that actually move fast have been moving fast and it's not over with yet we're not to a zero percent inflation rate and we won't be for a while because that imputed rent part on homeowners so-called rent payments is going to be rigidly sticky for a while I believe but the cash inflation rate has already come down hugely not reversing the higher prices from before but we're not seeing the year-over-year increases moving forward that we saw as that fully realizes on people long rates will continue to become more benign government debt will continue to become fully affordable at the levels that we're at and overall I will get to a point where the Federal Reserve will cut short-term interest rates and those rates will come down on government debt I'm telling you if we're now at the levels that we've handled nicely many times before we will continue to be over the next year and two years long term I don't know long terms long way away markets today won't price three four five years from now maybe three four five years from now there's all kinds of problems but in time periods that markets will price now everything's not so bad thank you very much for listening to me I very much hope you enjoyed this video as part of my series on debunking Common Market myths to watch more videos like this click the link on the screen and make sure to subscribe to Fisher Investments YouTube channel thanks so much for listening to me foreign
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