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What would a "Day of Reckoning" look like?

GNL says

What would a "Day of Reckoning" look like?

Hyperinflation.

I don't think the debt itself will cause hyperinflation.

HeadSet says

Hyperinflation.

Like the US housing market?

Fed keeps bailing out bad debt and government spend, this can’t sustain.

Quantitative Easing is bailing out bad debt. That’s balance sheet. Money printer is bailing out deficit spending. All inflationary.

GNL says

I don't think the debt itself will cause hyperinflation.

The debt would be THE cause of hyperinflation. When the debt is too high to even pay the interest the government pays it with a printing press and sets off hyperinflation.

RayAmerica says

HeadSet says

Hyperinflation.

Like the US housing market?

The housing market is nowhere near hyperinflation. Hyperinflation would be housing prices doubling every month and seeing $500million 1200 sqft homes.

The Bubble Is Bursting: Delinquency Rates Have Doubled And Credit Card Defaults Are Soaring
by Michael Snyder

"Did you know that U.S. households are carrying $1.18 trillion in credit card debt? Considering the fact that the average rate of interest on credit card balances is now over 20 percent, that is not good news at all. Sadly, most of the country is just barely scraping by from month to month in this very harsh economic environment, and turning to credit cards for some relief can be extremely tempting. A thousand dollar credit card balance can turn into four or five thousand dollars in the blink of an eye, and once you get that deep into the hole it can be very difficult to ever dig yourself out. Of course if you end up losing your job or having a major medical emergency, that can be enough to push you completely over the edge financially. Today, that is happening to an alarming number of Americans."

More here: https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/the-bubble-is-bursting-delinquency-rates-have-doubled-and-credit-card-defaults-are-soaring/

HeadSet says

The housing market is nowhere near hyperinflation. Hyperinflation would be housing prices doubling every month and seeing $500million 1200 sqft homes.

Technically you are correct. However, for those that cannot afford to purchase a highly inflated price for a home, or, are experiencing ever increasing rental rates, it no doubt feels like 'hyperinflation' for them.

By the way, you are providing a Weimar Republic type of hyperinflation as an example. The USA will probably never see anything remotely close to that, but it nevertheless is heading in the very same direction. Regarding housing, except for the well known pockets of real estate such as NYC, San Francisco, etc. residential real estate typically rose at a rate of about 3% annually. For well over a decade, since the Fed artificially kept home mortgage rates at record lows, real estate 'values' have dramatically increased ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. This cannot last. When the housing bubble finally bursts, and it will, the 2006/7 financial crisis will look like a picnic.

RayAmerica says

A thousand dollar credit card balance can turn into four or five thousand dollars in the blink of an eye, and once you get that deep into the hole it can be very difficult to ever dig yourself out.

What? That's just doubling down on stupid and putting more on the card. Gotta own that.

Also, it's a business transaction. Don't pay it. Can't go to jail in this country unless it's verifiable fraud. You just don't pay it. I don't condone this and you get a credit hit, but it's fact. They guilt you into thinking you have to pay it. People fucking kill themselves over this type of shit when they didn't need to.

Also $1k of CC debt is trivial. Carry upwards of $40-50k at one time, yet somehow it doesn't turn into $150k of debt. Fact is the person was not responsible with paying it off or purchases. That has little to do with the economy and more about personal responsibility and trying to keep up with the Jones'. Where I'm at all the idiots are getting $20-30k side by sides. Not for work, but leisure. That's retarded.

HeadSet says

GNL says

I don't think the debt itself will cause hyperinflation.

The debt would be THE cause of hyperinflation. When the debt is too high to even pay the interest the government pays it with a printing press and sets off hyperinflation.

We already do that

RayAmerica says

Did you know that U.S. households are carrying $1.18 trillion in credit card debt?

That figure can be misleading, as many use credit cards for virtually all purchases but pay off in full every month. That is thousands of dollars per month for each of these households that is included in that $1.8 trillion figure.

HeadSet says

RayAmerica says

Did you know that U.S. households are carrying $1.18 trillion in credit card debt?

That figure can be misleading, as many use credit cards for virtually all purchases but pay off in full every month. That is thousands of dollars per month for each of these households that is included in that $1.8 trillion figure.

Yep. That's my family. Wife expenses work stuff. We pay it off but could carry $10-30k in a month and that would probably be in the debt numbers. Also a ton of IC's put debt on a CC and get paid net 30. Have a landscaper friend that could drop $30-50k/mo in the spring and it's paid off, but again likely shows on the CC debt numbers.

I don't think a lot of people understand how a business is run if they haven't done it. They just see these big national numbers that are actually trivial. Some people put massive amounts on CC's that would make most people puke. It's not that big of a deal if you know what you're doing and responsible.

HeadSet says

RayAmerica says

Did you know that U.S. households are carrying $1.18 trillion in credit card debt?

That figure can be misleading, as many use credit cards for virtually all purchases but pay off in full every month. That is thousands of dollars per month for each of these households that is included in that $1.8 trillion figure.

Don’t be logical please, no one wants to read about sky which is not falling!

One thing that can really help is the beautiful tariff, which so far has been linked to almost no inflationary pressure, and is being absorbed almost entirely by multinationals.

Another thing would be all the property taxes, corporate taxes, income taxes, and excise taxes that will be collected once outsources re-shore jobs back to the USA.

And finally, deporting as many immigrants, legal and illegal, as possible.

https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2025/11/02/314-how-wealth-dies/

Just as growth in the “real” economy of material products and services has been decelerating towards contraction, so aggregates of financial wealth have carried on increasing relentlessly.

Since the widening disequilibrium between the monetary and the material must eventually crash the financial system, the probability is that notional wealth will reach its peak at the same moment at which the monetary system collapses. ...

On this basis, global material prosperity has grown by 25% since 2004, which is nowhere near claimed “growth” of 96% in real GDP over that period. Moreover, the 25% rise in aggregate prosperity has been matched by the rise in population numbers over those twenty years.

The ongoing rate of deceleration is such that aggregate material prosperity is projected to be 17% lower in 2050 than it is now, which is likely to make the “average” person about 31% poorer than he or she is today. ...

Various conclusions follow from this principle of money as claim. One of the most important, as regular readers will know, is the imperative need to think conceptually in terms of two economies. One of these is the “real” economy of material products and services, and the other is the parallel “financial” economy of money, transactions and credit.

Another is the absolute futility of any attempt to explain the economy by disregarding the material and concentrating entirely on money. ...

But everything changed in October 1987.

On “Black Monday”, the markets crashed, with the Dow losing 508 points, or 22.6%, in a matter of hours.

What was really significant, though, was that the authorities stepped in to shore up the markets. One of the most important players was the Federal Reserve, which had itself been created in 1913 in response to another such crash, the Knickerbocker crisis of 1907. ...

Behind all of this, though – and seldom noticed by observers – lies the fact that all “values” routinely ascribed to wealth aggregates are fundamentally bogus. ...

The fatal error made here is that of using marginal transaction prices to put a “value” on aggregate quantities of assets.

We might think that, were all global stock markets to fall to zero, about $180tn of wealth would have been eliminated.

In fact, that supposed “value” was only ever notional, and never existed in any meaningful form in the first place, because at no point was it ever capable of monetization. ...

The real comfort, if any is to be found, is that anyone who can find a way of preserving value will have the opportunity of buying utility value at pennies on the dollar. The term “utility” is the watch-word here, because essentials will remain essential even as society is picking over the wreckage of discretionary sectors.