It can be argued that the world is suffering from an epidemic of chronic debt. The financial sector loves to play on words and would rather call certain debt issues as a credit crisis as if it were a temporary thing like a mid-life crisis. This is also similar to renaming junk bonds to something more user friendly like a household pet, high yield bonds. There seems to be a naïve euphoria that the problems in Europe are now resolved. Nothing has been resolved aside from forcefully cramming down write-downs and creating more debt to bailout more financial institutions. As the markets rally on this news we have now officially crossed the $15 trillion barrier with total public debt in our own nation. The world continues to fuel a debt induced problem with more debt. Our entire system has been captured by this financialization where everything from a college education, to automobiles, to purchasing a home have become mechanisms to enslave people with ungodly amounts of debt and send profits to the few in the gilded financial class. As this goes along the elite in the financial sector become wealthier while the majority of Americans are left behind.

Crossing into the abyss of debt

$15 trillion should get any person’s attention and we have crossed that market with the public debt auctions of this week:



This information has yet to be updated on the U.S. Treasury website but make no mistake, the $15 trillion figure has been breached. Is this disturbing to anyone else that our total public debt is roughly 100 percent of our GDP? Here you have Europe chastising nations for broaching this threshold and we simply continue to expand the debt at a feverish pitch. It is amazing to think that only a decade ago people were talking about paying the entire national debt off. Not going to happen.

Yet this massive debt expansion is largely coming by bailing the bad debt of the banking system. As most Americans know, access to this easy debt is not available for most Americans who are actually in the process of de-leveraging:

This is the dualistic nature of our system. American households are being forced to deal with the austerity of the current crisis while the banking system has virtually unlimited access to the Federal Reserve and their digital printing press and virtual loan junkyard. Now wouldn’t it be nice if you had a place where you could dump all your housing, credit card, and education debt and simply move on? Unless you are a too big to fail bank, this pathway is not available.

Are we experiencing a peak debt situation?

One of the more mind numbing figures is coming from the student loan market. The average student loan debt for a graduate is now:

And the median wage for Americans is almost the same amount:

Source: Social Security, Reuters

This is the problem with simply going into a system where everything is run on giant levels of debt. The notion of saving to buy a car or even to pay for an education have become horribly distorted because easy access to debt has inflated the prices beyond any reasonable market levels. Think of the housing market and how prices imploded. Why do these massive debt games implode? Because at a certain point the financial sector decides to scam the system and get away with it. With housing it was the introduction of toxic loans and the industry became so corrupt, that it became comical in regards to no-doc, no-job loans. Similar parallels are now occurring with student loans and the higher education market. It isn’t that the market is pushing prices to these levels, it is because access to student loans are so easy to get. In fact, the less you have the more you are likely to get. No surprise that we will soon cross the $1 trillion mark for student debt.

Very few are becoming rich because of this financialization of our country. A folly and a con job has taken over our nation for decades. People are now waking up. $15 trillion is no joke unless you enjoy being a zombie nation simply surviving because of debt.

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