It takes a long time for the Titanic to sink,  but, eventually there’s a huge booming crack, the bow and stern both point skywards, and it all goes down remarkably quickly.

Yesterday the U.S national debt passed a historic benchmark of 40 trillion dollars. Every single day, we pay a couple billion dollars just in interest on that debt. In another year or two the largest expenditure, greater than military spending, medicare, and social security spending, will be simply paying to SERVICE the debt- not even to pay it down at all only interest payments. In the meantime,  the U.S continues on an unabated and absolutely inexcusable deficit spending spree. Yesterday treasury secretary Scott Bessent issued a slew of short term bonds to buy back long term debt to try to stabilize the long-term treasury markets as yields are rising precipitously. Why have yields been rising? Lots of reasons,  honestly- these things are incredibly complex in some respects- but there are a couple glaring, simple reasons that most 10 year olds could understand if you did a good job explaining it to them. The first one is that Americans and their leaders have clearly demonstrated for more than 10 years that we are not serious or trustworthy people.  We’re basically Veruca Salt with Nukes. Now that we have elected Donald Trump for the second time,  the rest of the world knows it wasn’t a fluke- it’s a structural, cultural, endemic problem. Trump isn’t just a sick individual, but the symptom and representative of a sick, stupid and antisocial society.

What does this have to do with yeilds? Well, everything.  For decades,  investors showed up at U.S bond auctions and everyone was willing to lend us money at low interest rates BECAUSE THEY TRUSTED US. They thought they knew who we were.  We were trustworthy. We were reliable. We were the best bet for this kind of investment because we were known to be serious (or serious enough) people. Now the mask has come off, or something has dramatically changed,  but in any case,  our bond auctions have been pretty sparsely populated lately. The only way at this point to get anyone to lend us money is to offer higher and higher returns in the form of higher interest rates. 

And we are STILL deficit spending, more and more every day,  for war, and frankly,  for corruption. As Kyle Kulinski always says,  the Pentagon is basically a slush fund for the Epstein class. It has failed 8 audits in a row and we are running out of munitions 6 months into Trump’s illegal war on Iran. The only money we really know leaves the Pentagon is the billions every year that go to Israel to keep doing genocide and illegal land grabs on our dime. Where does the rest of the money allocated to the Pentagon go? Honey, I wish I knew. 

In this country,  we don’t have health care.  We don’t have education.  We don’t have childcare.  We don’t have infrastructure. All this borrowing is not for any of those things.  We are in 40 Trillion and rising dollars of debt because it costs money to blow up kids and line the pockets of Trump and his Oligarchs.

All bad news, right? Well, yeah, but here’s the good news (not painless, but I would argue still good): it can’t go on forever.  In fact,  although it takes a long time for the Titanic to sink, I would posit that it can’t stay afloat much longer.  The deficit is 40 trillion and going nowhere but up. The world is dumping U.S T-notes and buying gold. Even Japan, the largest foreign holder of U.S treasuries, because of its own currency and liquidity issues, is starting to sell U.S treasuries and re-shore its wealth. The real economy has atrophied and shrivelled for years under financialization, inflation and rising costs, dysfunction, the predations of private equity, etc. and the lemon of the working class has been squeezed entirely dry. Car repos are high and rising.  Rates of delinquency on mortgages, student debt and credit card debt are rising. There IS no new source of revenue to start paying down this debt UNLESS the U.S government would get serious and tax the 1% and the giant multinational U.S corporations. That’s who the corruption has directed all this borrowed money to. In order to pay back lenders and pay down the debt, you have to get money from the people who are sitting on all the money.  And this regime will never do that. 

So, 40 trillion and rising. Weirder and more desperate shell games and balance rollovers from Bessent. Fewer and fewer buyers at the bond auctions. Rates that will continue to rise no matter what Bessent does, and the insane spending on kid-killing and pocket-lining continuing at a steady clip, with borrowed money, until… until what?

I honestly don’t see how this ends in any way other than the U.S defaulting on it’s debt. Which, to be clear, would lead to a collapse of the global economy and financial system. To my mind,  it’s a question not of if, but of when.

And that actually makes me feel not scared, but hopeful. When I (and many others) said in the beginning of this that we should, to the best of our ability, stop spending money on non-essentials, that we should slow-roll or withdraw our participation in the labor economy, it was because I have believed from the very beginning that the only way to effectively neutralize the fascist regime in the U.S, to stop the construction of the wraparound Palantir survellance state and the concentration camps and ICE gestapo, the U.S funded genocide in Palestine, the illegal war on Iran and the cruel and fatal blockade on Cuba and war crimes in the Caribbean, the saber-rattling at Canada, Mexico, and Greenland and the relentless extraction of the multiracial working class by a theocratic white supremacist Gilead ruling class was (and still is) to destabalize, cripple and ultimately end U.S economic supremacy, dollar dominance, and the economic coercive control in the global financial system (including, critically, the petrodollar) that has allowed the U.S to deficit spend as much as it wants for 80 years. I knew,  and still do,  that all of this power and the magnet inside the coercive control was the resilience and percieved stability of the « middle » (working) class in America. If we are buying, we’re working,  we’re paying taxes. We’re « milkable ». It has always been the percieved health of the American consumer- we the people being willing to always keep buying shit, even with money we don’t have- that has made lenders confident that the U.S will have the money to pay back it’s debts, and thus, lenders have been willing to accept low interest rates on U.S bonds. The kryptonite these ghouls have NEVER wanted us to get our grubby little hands on is the knowledge that WE hold the power. Their ability to keep up their violence and their grift depends entirely on us, at the end of the day.  But now,  I think it’s obvious and many more of us are realizing it. They cannot hide the collapse behind circular financing and balance rollovers and currency swaps forever. What we are seeing in the bond market in late August 2026 is at least in part the first really signifigant fruit of our economic resistance to the Trump regime.

I find it invigorating, and I think you should, too.

What will the ocean’s surface look like, after the ship goes down? How will the spray feel on our faces?