Stories for Children: The US Economic Fairytale

By Matthew Piepenburg

When Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall and took a big fall, “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put Humpty-Dumpty together again.”

I see a similar fate for the US debt egg, whose cracks are just about, well… everywhere.

The first obvious (but media ignored) signs of this breaking egg emerged in September of 2019, when the TBTF banks no longer trusted each other’s collateral and the repo markets spiked overnight, prompting Uncle Fed to be the lender of last resort to its spoiled little banking nephews.

This required hundreds and hundreds of billions in mouse-clicked liquidity.

But then again, what does a billion or trillion even mean anymore to a mouse-clicker and $31+T (and growing) Public debt?