At the beginning of Trump’s first presidential term in 2016, US national debt stood at just under $20tn. It has doubled in the decade since.<\/p>\n
According to the Congress Joint Economic Committee, the figure is rising by about $90,000 every second, or $7.8bn a day.<\/p>\n
“What’s very different now compared to a decade ago is the level of interest rates,” says Eric Swanson, professor of economics at University of California and former senior economist at the Federal Reserve.<\/p>\n
“Long-term interest rates in the US are at multi-decade highs – part of that is concerns about inflation, but part of that is concerns about the extreme levels of US government borrowing.”<\/p>\n
The bond market is demanding higher returns with investors wary of the scale of the US’s debt, but also because tech firms borrowing eye-watering sums to spend on AI are competing with the government for investors’ cash.<\/p>\n
“What happens when interest rates go up is that the funding of the deficit becomes more expensive,” says economist Mohamed A. El-Erian, a professor at the Wharton School.<\/p>\n
Interest payments on government debt are now 15% higher than the same period last year, says El-Erian. They are almost 20% of tax revenue “larger than defence”, he adds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the beginning of Trump’s first presidential term in 2016, US national debt stood at just under $20tn.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":744783,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-744782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=744782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/744783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}