Ted

⚡️I think the deepest mistake is expecting the U.S. debt problem to end in a cinematic “crisis.” The system has been surviving by changing the unit in which the promise is measured. That is why people can be directionally right for fifteen years and look early the entire time. The United States owes dollars. It controls the dollar. So the most likely resolution is not a clean default. It is a long sequence where nominal obligations keep getting honored while the real value of those obligations is quietly reduced through inflation, negative real rates, financial repression, asset inflation, tax creep, and periodic policy intervention. That is why “unsustainable” can persist for decades. The debt does not need to disappear. The meaning of a dollar can disappear instead. That is the structural escape hatch