Don’t Worry, They’ll Just Print More

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and all you paranoid preppers stocking up on canned beans and Bitcoin: Gather ’round. It’s time for the annual, highly-anticipated US Government Shutdown.

Forget your summer blockbuster. This is Washington’s version of a Christmas pantomime—a yearly tradition where the world’s supposed superpower locks itself in the basement, forgets where it left the spare key, and then starts shouting about its crippling debt. It’s the ultimate reality TV show, featuring the most dysfunctional cast of characters ever assembled, all arguing over who left the national credit card maxed out this time.

And the best part? The rest of the globe is sitting there, collective jaw dropped, thinking, “Wait, you can’t even manage the household bills, but you’re telling us how to run our nuclear programs?” The sheer, glorious, apocalyptic audacity of it all is almost beautiful.

The Great American Financial Meltdown: A History of ‘Oopsies!’

You might be under the quaint, old-fashioned impression that the US government actually honours its debts. Bless your heart. That’s like believing your flat-earther uncle is going to win a Nobel Prize for physics.

As your scattered notes so delightfully point out, Washington has a history of defaulting that would make a dodgy loan shark blush. They don’t just miss payments; they rewrite the entire concept of currency. From the War of 1812’s “whoops, no cash” moment to Lincoln’s Greenbacks, Roosevelt’s gold-clause voiding, and Nixon slamming the ‘Gold Window’ shut in ’71, the US has executed a magnificent series of financial disappearing acts.

It’s all just a sophisticated version of what Darth Vader said to Lando Calrissian (who, let’s be honest, probably knows a thing or two about dodgy deals): “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

Today’s alteration? It’s not gold or silver—that would be too tangible. No, today’s crisis is a beautiful, digital, unmanageable tidal wave of debt that has already zoomed past a cool $1 trillion a year in interest alone. Soon, that interest payment—the money paid just to keep the lights vaguely flickering—will be bigger than Social Security.

Let that sink in. The nation will be spending more on its overdue credit card bill than it does on feeding and housing its ageing population. It’s the fiscal equivalent of ordering caviar when you can’t afford the rent, and it’s pure, unadulterated dystopia.

The Untouchables: A Budget That’s Pure Political Lead

So why not just cut spending? Oh, darling, you sweet, naïve soul. You’re forgetting the cardinal rule of American politics: The most expensive stuff is politically untouchable.

1. Entitlements (Social Security, Medicare): Cutting these is political suicide. You simply do not mess with Grandma’s bridge club money. She votes. She’s watching you.
2. Defense Spending: With the current geopolitical environment (which we can only assume is being dictated by a committee of angry teenagers playing Risk), the military budget is less of a budget and more of a ceremonial gold-plated trough. It only goes up.
3. Welfare Programs: Likewise, a third rail of American governance.

Your fantasy solution—a leader who restores a “limited Constitutional Republic”—is frankly adorable. It’s about as likely as me dating a billionaire who doesn’t use his jet for a vanity-fueled space race. Washington cannot slow the spending growth rate, let alone cut it.

You could take 100% of the wealth from every single US billionaire (all 806 of them, worth a combined $5.8 trillion, according to Forbes), and you’d barely fund one single year of federal spending. That’s right. Steal all the super-yachts, the private islands, the silly hats—and it still wouldn’t be enough to plug the hole. The ship is taking on water faster than Congress can invent new accounting tricks.

The Sixth Default: Slow-Motion Poisoning

The biggest joke of all? The inevitable sixth default won’t be a dramatic, movie-worthy event. There’s no gold to leave, no contracts to dramatically rip up. The new default is a slow-motion, financial poisoning via the Federal Reserve.

The US government needs to issue more and more debt, but it also needs to keep interest rates low so the cost of that debt doesn’t literally bankrupt them tomorrow. This is where the Fed comes in, and the beautiful illusion of its “independence” shatters into a million gold-dust fragments.

The Fed, that supposedly wise, apolitical body, is about to be forced to slash rates, buy Treasuries, and launch wave after wave of digital money printing. Why? Because the alternative is admitting they are broke, and who wants to do that when you have a perfectly good printing press?

The whole charade is collapsing, best summed up by a Morgan Stanley CIO who was recently heard saying, “The Fed does have an obligation to help the government fund itself.” Translation: The supposedly independent financial guardian is now just the government’s highly-paid, slightly embarrassed personal ATM.

This is the true, black-hearted humour of the current shutdown and debt crisis. The world is watching the US government play a game of chicken with a cliff, secure in the knowledge that when they inevitably drive off, they’ll just print themselves a parachute.

The resulting currency debasement—the slow, quiet act of stiffing creditors with dollars worth less than the paper they were promised—won’t make a big headline. It’ll be a bleed-out. And as the rest of the world (including central banks now frantically moving back toward gold) quietly takes their chips and walks away from the table, we’re left with one certainty:

The US government can’t agree on how to fund itself, but they’re absolutely united on one thing: they will keep borrowing, keep spending, and keep debasing the dollar until the final, ridiculous curtain falls.

So, the question is not if the world’s most powerful nation will collapse its own currency, but whether you’ll be on the losing end of their inevitable, entirely predictable, and deeply unserious economic punchline.

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Do you think the US should just start accepting payment in “Zimbabwe dollars” for a good laugh, or should they switch to an entirely new, blockchain-based currency called ‘DebtCoin’?