The Debt Ceiling “Crisis” Is Over And Now US Debt Will Rise From $31 Trillion To $50 Trillion By 2030

By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

“No one got everything they wanted, but the American people got what they needed,” said Biden in his twelve-minute address to the nation.

“We averted an economic crisis and an economic collapse,” continued the President, seated behind the Resolute Desk.

“Nothing – nothing would have been more irresponsible. Nothing would have been more catastrophic.” And this whole notion of saving humanity by solving an imaginary crisis of our own creation is so preposterous to anyone not directly involved in the drama that I naturally searched for something more interesting.

The Resolute was one of four British sailing ships, built with especially thick oak hulls, sent to the Arctic in 1854 to rescue a lost exploratory expedition. The four ships became locked in ice. Their crews fled on foot across the frozen ocean. They all survived, courageously, heroically, miraculously.

American whalers recovered The Resolute 1,000 miles from where it had been abandoned. The US Navy repaired this sole surviving ship and returned it to England in 1856. After it was decommissioned in 1880, Queen Victoria crafted the Resolute Desk from its hull and gifted it as a symbol of goodwill.

It is unlikely that in the decades ahead a head of state will send the White House a gift to commemorate the goodwill shown by America in rescuing our foreign creditors from the potentially catastrophic default they faced in 2023. No one will even remember it.

What will hold their attention is the inexorable expansion of our extraordinary debt, which is set to rise from $31.4trln today to $50trln by 2030 and then really take off (assuming rather benign economic and market conditions which we know rarely persist uninterrupted).

And we in the private sector are commissioned to somehow, in some way, chart a miraculous path out, through ingenuity and innovation. Sparking a historic productivity boom.