How Surging Borrowing Costs Are Consuming the U.S. Budget

The U.S. government just closed the books on Fiscal Year 2026. The final budget report card, to be perfectly frank, is the stuff of banana republics.

The deficit for the year came in at $1.992 trillion. This gap between government revenue and government spending was made up with debt.

Moreover, this $1.992 trillion in new debt was racked and stacked on top of the gross national debt. Several months ago, the national debt blew past $40 trillion. The last we checked it was clocked at a crisp $40.38 trillion.

Does anyone care? The economy keeps churning. Washington keeps spending. And stocks continue to maintain their sky-high valuations.

Yet, while everyone was marveling at the promise of AI and complaining about the price of ground beef, the underlying mechanics of America’s debt machine fundamentally shifted. At the start of the decade, we were still in an era of near-zero interest rates. Borrowing trillions was practically free.

Now, in late-2026, the low-rate era is officially dead. What’s more, the bill for decades of living on credit has finally come due. Continue reading →

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Big Tech’s Great Financial Gamble

“A lot of investors have no clue what they are investing in.”

– Hock Tan, CEO Broadcom

Off-Balance-Sheet Alchemy

Where is the AI boom going? Is it taking us to a place of economic and financial nirvana? Or are we on the road to catastrophe?

These are the type of important, fundamental questions the rapid AI buildout can provoke. The answers, however, can only be known after the fact.

In the meantime, what is known is that building, training, and deploying AI models requires physical infrastructure at a massive scale. Hyperscale data center campuses spanning thousands of acres, massive power interconnection agreements capable of pulling gigawatts from local electrical grids, and colossal amounts of specialized silicon chips like Nvidia’s high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) and custom tensor processing units (TPUs).

To compete in this high-stakes arms race, technology companies and AI labs are rapidly burning through insane amounts of cash. Analysts estimate that global capital expenditures tied to AI infrastructure could reach several trillion dollars before the decade is out. Continue reading →

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How Government Intervention Destroys Markets and Mandates Scarcity

The systematic erosion of purchasing power over the last few decades has coincided directly with a devastating decline in living standards for middle-class wage earners and prudent savers alike. You can visibly see it in most cities across America.

Areas that a generation ago were nice, clean neighborhoods are now blighted and decayed. Those with the means to do so moved on long ago. Those who remain are left with the ugliness.

But that’s not all. As we recently noted, when central planners intentionally debase a currency, they don’t just erode hard-earned savings; they tear apart the very moral fabric of society.

From revolutionary France’s catastrophic reliance on paper assignats to the modern Federal Reserve’s relentless balance-sheet expansions, the ruinous playbook never changes. Hard work and patient, disciplined saving are gradually replaced by financial desperation and wild, speculative gambling.

And once a populace begins to feel the suffocating squeeze of rapid dollar debasement, they look for someone – anyone – to stop the bleeding. They don’t typically point their angry fingers at the central bank or the reckless spending sprees in Washington. Instead, they look at the retail checkout counter, wrongly blaming local merchants and business owners. Continue reading →

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What Revolutionary France Teaches Us About Fiat Money Collapse

“Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper-money.”

– Daniel Webster, 1832

Crushing the Middle Class

What if the savings in your bank account lost 50 percent of its value over the next 12 months? Would you be a tad irate? Would you wish you’d transferred some of those savings into gold today when it was merely $4,200 per ounce?

It’s unlikely the U.S. dollar will lose 50 percent of its value over the next 12-months. But, based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own inflation calculator, the dollar has lost 50 percent of its value since the turn of the century. In other words, per official inflation statistics, it takes a dollar today to buy what $0.50 could buy on January 1, 2000.

Of course, we all know the BLS inflation numbers are grossly understated. When it comes to housing, it takes a dollar in 2026 to buy what $0.33 did in 2000. With respect to gold, a dollar today gets you what just $0.07 did in 2000.

Still, an official 50 percent devaluation over 26 years has turned saving, investing, and planning for the future into a cruel, unwinnable game. Unless you’re already wealthy, with a diverse pool of assets – stocks, bonds, gold, properties, farmland, all spread across several continents – you likely find yourself with nothing to show for your years of labor. And your kids, seeing this losing plight, may have taken to sports betting or speculating on cryptocurrencies with the hopes that, just maybe, with a little luck, they’ll get ahead. Continue reading →

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