Debt

U.S. government debt now tops $9 trillion, before taking into account its unfunded obligations for Social Security and Medicare -- debts that the retiring boomers will soon have their hands out to collect.

After adding in Social Security, Medicare and all the government's other pay-later obligations, the current debt actually comes in at over $60 trillion-an amount so large, not one person in a million has a real sense of it. So let's try to put that number into perspective.

A trillion is 1000 X 1000 X 1000 X 1000, or a million millions. In his first address to Congress, President Reagan, himself a big spender, accurately pointed out that a stack of $1,000 bills four inches high makes you a millionaire, and that a trillion dollars would be a stack 67 miles high!

The U.S. government owes 60 of those sky-piercing stacks of $1,000 bills.

It's a lot of money. And it's not just any kind of money. Amazingly, this unbacked currency of a bankrupt government is still the reserve currency of virtually every nation in the world today. But not, we think, for much longer.

To service its debt and keep the game going, the U.S. government must sell on the order of $2.5 billion per day in new Treasury bills, much of it to foreigners already sitting on something like $6 trillion of U.S. paper.

Absent the foreign buyers of U.S. Treasury securities, the whole scam begins to unravel. And once it begins to unravel in earnest, with wealthy foreigners and then governments rushing to switch out of dollars, the speed and steepness of the monetary collapse will be breathtaking.