With the United States’ national debt closing in on $34.2 trillion, some of the biggest figures in the world of finance have been speaking out. But few expected Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to address the issue—at least until this weekend, when Powell spoke out about the debt on CBS’s 60 Minutes Sunday. “In the long run, the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path,” Powell warned.
Even as the U.S. economy avoided a widely forecast recession in 2023, record government spending and lower tax receipts led the national debt to surge to an all-time high. And that trend has continued into this year. The U.S. government debt to GDP ratio, a measure of total public debt to economic growth, has surged from just over 100% in 2019 to over 120%. That’s down from the COVID-era peak of 133%, but, as Powell put it, the government’s debt is still “growing faster than the economy.”
This means it’s now “past…
