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<p>As Wilbur Ross so eloquently noted, for Puerto Rico "it's the end of the beginning... and the beginning of the end," as he explained "Puerto Rico is the US version of Greece." However, as JPMorgan explains, for some states the pain is really just beginning as Municipal bond risk will only become more important over time, as assets of some severely underfunded plans are gradually depleted.</p>

June, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) put the U.S. government's debt at a staggering $18 trillion. But according to a former U.S. comptroller general, the actual debt is $65 trillion -- more than triple the official figure -- and it isn't going to improve as long as politicians continue to put their personal and partisan interests ahead of the nation's. David Walker, who served as the head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) from 1998 to 2008, told John Catsimatidis, host of "The Cats Roundtable" on New York radio station WNYM, that there's much more to the debt than just...

It’s an ill financial wind that blows no one some good. A very nice and very rich old lady once explained to me that, in her view, the golden age of the American economy happened in the first years of the Reagan administration. This puzzled me: The United States had dipped into recession in 1980, and Paul Volcker was standing on the economic brakes to wring the Carter-era inflation out of the economy, jacking the federal-funds target rate up to damned near 20 percent. People were paying 18.5 percent on their mortgages. But, of course, usurious interest rates are pretty...

I’ve long-stated that the government of the United States is completely insolvent. And that is 100% true statement. The government’s own numbers show that official liabilities, including debt held by the public and federal retirement benefits, total $20.7 trillion. Yet the government’s assets, including the value of the entire federal highway system, the national parks, cash balances, etc. totals just over $3 trillion. In total, their ‘net worth’ is NEGATIVE $17.7 TRILLION… a level that completely dwarfs the housing crisis. If you include the government’s own estimates of the Social Security shortfall, this number declines to NEGATIVE $60 TRILLION. And...

(CNSNews.com) - The portion of the federal debt that is subject to a legal limit set by Congress closed Thursday, June 11, at $18,112,975,000,000, according to the latest Daily Treasury Statement, which was published at 4:00 p.m. on Friday. That, according to the Treasury's statements, makes 90 straight days the debt subject to the limit has been frozen at $18,112,975,000,000. $18,112,975,000,000 is about $25 million below the current legal debt limit of $18,113,000,080,959.35.

The Federal Reserve drew up extensive plans for handling a U.S. debt default that included scheduling deferred payments and lending cash to investors, according to a lawmaker who cited Fed documents. America courted disaster in 2011 and 2013 when political fights over the national debt nearly left the federal government unable to pay its bills. Analysts and officials warned that missing payments could lead to economic calamity, and details have only slowly emerged over how financial officials braced for the unthinkable. In a June 2014 letter to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew seen by Reuters on Monday, Republican Representative Jeb Hensarling...

(CNSNews.com) -- The U.S. has a $210 trillion “fiscal gap” and “may well be in worse fiscal shape than any developed country, including Greece,” Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff told members of the Senate Budget Committee in written and oral testimony on Feb. 25. “The first point I want to get across is that our nation is broke,” Kotlikoff testified. “Our nation’s broke, and it’s not broke in 75 years or 50 years or 25 years or 10 years. It’s broke today. "Indeed, it may well be in worse fiscal shape than any developed country, including Greece," he said. (See...

Tyler Durden 01/02/2015 It seems like it was only yesterday when we reported that, in yet another slight of hand for the US Treasury and Social Security Administration, US debt rose by $32 billion on the last day of November sending total US debt above $18 trillion for the first time ever. As we further noted, it also meant "that total US debt has increased by 70% under Obama, from $10.625 trillion on January 21, 2009 to $18.005 trillion most recently." Fast forward to today when we are happy to report that according to the US Treasury, America's debt-funded spending...

WASHINGTON - The federal government has grown obscenely fat over the years, and under President Obama it's gotten much fatter, eating into our economy and the very foundations that made America great. It has outgrown our incomes and now threatens us with suffocating debt, costly regulations, punishing mandates, and a punitive tax code that's invaded every nook and cranny of our society and our daily lives. You don't hear much about this growing crisis, certainly not in the national news media which never saw a federal domestic program it didn't like. Even a lot less in Congress which enacts our...

Regular readers of my column know that I usually don’t use the words “conservative” and “liberal.” Why is that? Because those words in today’s lingo—like the words “love” and “democracy”—can mean almost anything you want. Unlike past times when precision in meanings was important, we have now produced a generation that no longer understands the historic or political meaning of those words. Within the population of the confused, however, my greatest disappointment is held for those who describe themselves as economically conservative, but socially liberal. But do they even know what that means? On the economics side, this is what...

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is acting in a bipartisan way to cover up the biggest single threat to the bipartisan political alliance that is stripping America of its wealth: the United States Congress. There is no question that the following policy is bipartisan. Democrats and Republicans in Congress are completely agreed that the following information should not get out to the American people, namely, that the present value of the United States government’s off-budget liabilities is over $200 trillion. The CBO has two sets of books. This is what any Ponzi scheme requires. It releases one set of books...

<p>For the next few years, deficits are looking pretty good. But the interest owed on the country's cumulative debt is set to nearly quadruple over the next decade.</p> <p>The Congressional Budget Office projects that interest will be $233 billion this year, or 1.3% as a share of the economy.</p>

Obama Adds Over $500 Billion In New Debt in Just Three Months Under McConnell’s Blank Check Debt Ceiling Deal Half a Trillion in Just Three Months President Barack Obama has blown through more than $500 billion in deficit spending in the three months since passage of the deal proposed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on easing the debt ceiling battles that gave Obama virtually unlimited borrowing authority from October 17, 2013 through this February 7th. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew sent a letter to Congress today imploring the debt ceiling be raised by February 7th, or the end of...

The financial position of the U.S. is not just troubled; it is artificially created to fool the people. The nation's budget deficit and debt are exponentially higher than what our politicians say they are. None of the headline figures used as the basis of public discourse have any relevance to the true state of U.S. finances. The government's financial reporting is misleading because our political leaders have subverted the democratic process to advance their personal interests. Adding all of the costs associated with the nation's social-insurance programs to the amounts reflected in the Financial Report shows that over the past...

Each U.S. taxpayer now has a federal-debt liability of $1.1 million, and rising. Remember that when President Obama boasts that the federal deficit—the shortfall between annual revenues and spending—is declining. Of course, the primary reason for the decline is the sequester, which was his idea but now adamantly opposes. The public tends to focus on the total national debt, which just passed the $17 trillion mark—up from $10.6 trillion when President Obama took office. But that figure pales in comparison to the federal government’s long term unfunded liabilities—money the government is obligated to pay over and above the revenues it...

We have all heard the news stories about people so morbidly obese that they could not exit their house or apartment. I remember one story of a person who had to be lifted out with a crane after a wall was removed. These people are addicted to eating, and in some cases, ate incessantly even though they knew that they were jeopardizing their health and eventually, their lives. They grew so large that they were barely able to move and rendered themselves largely useless except as a food-disposal unit. This reminds me of our federal government, which was once agile...

If Congress doesn't raise the debt ceiling soon, the U.S. government won't be able to pay its debts. Here's who the government owes money to — all the holders of U.S. Treasury debt, broken down by category and by how much government debt they hold. Notes The graph includes debt owed to the Social Security trust fund and other federal funds. These are sometimes excluded when calculating the debt for other purposes. For details, see this GAO report. Source: Federal Reserve; FMS; GAO; Social Security Administration Credit: Quoctrung Bui For more, see our story: What A U.S. Default Would Mean...

Please note that the current debt limit is $16.699 trillion. Debt to the Penny Interestingly, the US Treasury website Debt to the Penny and Who Hold It shows the current public debt as 16,747,429,285,635.12 (the same as Nick shows in the above chart). Treasury Stops Updating National Debt You do not have to be a math genius to figure out that "debt to the penny" already exceeds the debt limit. I asked Nick about that and he replied ... Since mid-May, "debt to the penny" hasn't been rising. When they postponed raising the debt limit they stopped showing any increase...

<p>Full title: Who Is Going To Buy The US Debt If This War Causes China, Russia And The Rest Of The World To Turn On Us?</p> <p>Yesterday we implied a difficult question when we illustrated the huge size of US Treasury bond holdings that China and Russia have between them - accounting for 25% of all foreign held debt - implicitly funding US standards of living (along with the Federal Reserve). The difficult question is "Can the U.S. really afford to greatly anger the rest of the world when they are the ones that are paying our bills?" What is going to happen if China, Russia and many other large nations stop buying our debt and start rapidly dumping U.S. debt that they already own? If the United States is not very careful, it is going to pay a tremendous economic price for taking military action in Syria.</p>