https://ia601303.us.archive.org/6/items/GrunchOfGiants/R.BuckminsterFullerGrunchOfGiants2004.pdf
Grunch of Giants portrays the rising multinational corporations in the paradoxical role of functioning both as the epitome of capitalistic selfishness and as the inadvertent vehicle for the dissolution of national political boundaries, the last deterrent to a one-world economy. The result is more subversive of the property and profit values of the capitalist system than anything dreamed of since Karl Marx.
- E.J. Applewhite, Jr.
https://commodity.com/data/china/debt-clock/
This excludes local government financing vehicles. We suggest you multiply by at least 3.25 for this figure, then consider adding a figure for China's shadow banking (loans outside of formal banks)
Updated on Thu, August 1, 2024 by the USAFacts Team
https://www.pgpf.org/national-debt-clock
America's growing debt is the result of simple math — each year, there is a mismatch between spending and revenues.
Economy is bad. People are hanging onto their money and not wanting to spend. Retail dead quiet with stores in malls covering discounts to try and get people through the door.
U.S. Household Debt Is at an All-Time High
Household debt across all categories grew by 4.8% from Q3 2022 to Q3 2023, according to the latest statistics from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY). This includes mortgages, home equity revolving debt, auto loans, credit cards, student loans and other consumer lending such as retail cards. The total household debt of $17.3 trillion entering 2024 is a new high for the U.S.
When the federal government spends more than it takes in, we have to borrow money to cover that annual deficit. And each year’s deficit adds to our growing national debt.
Historically, our largest deficits were caused by increased spending around national emergencies like major wars or the Great Depression.
The coronavirus crisis has accelerated an already unsustainable fiscal trajectory, both because of its devastating effect on the economy and the necessary legislative response. Moving forward, it will be critical for America’s leaders to address our rising debt, and its structural factors, which are described below.
The form of capitalism that is being consolidated on a planetary scale is not that which it had assumed in the West: it is, rather, capitalism in its communist variation, which unites an extremely rapid development of production with a totalitarian political regime. This is the historical significance of the leading role that China is taking on, not only in the realm of the economy in a narrow sense, but also – as the political use of the pandemic has so eloquently demonstrated – as a paradigm for the government of men. That the regimes established in so-called communist countries were a particular form of capitalism, specially adapted for economically backward countries and thus labelled ‘state capitalism’, was perfectly clear to anyone who knows how to read history; what was entirely unexpected, however, is that this form of capitalism, which seemed to have exhausted its function and was thus now obsolete, was instead destined – in a technologically updated configuration – to become the ruling principle of the current phase of globalized capitalism. Indeed, it is possible that today we are observing a conflict between Western capitalism, which used to exist alongside the ‘state of law’ and bourgeois democracy, and this new communist capitalism, a conflict in which the latter version appears to have emerged as the victor. What is certain, however, is that the new regime will combine the most inhumane aspects of capitalism with the most atrocious aspects of state communism, combining the extreme alienation of relations between people with an unprecedented social control.
– Giorgio Agamben
December 15th, 2020.
https://youtu.be/1sR9hEL7Hvw?si=wt0PhHwgFxNBwIqp