United States Debt: A Stack of $100 Bills 10,712 Miles High

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United States Debt: A Stack of $100 Bills 10,712 Miles High
Evidence that the very high stack is crashing back to earth

By Bob Stokes
Fri, 29 Jun 2012 17:00:00 ET

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If you've ever seen the national debt clock, you know it's moving nonstop and very rapidly higher.

That clock shows that the United States debt stands near $15,820,142,000,000 – as in almost $16 trillion.

How might a U.S. citizen even think about such a mind-boggling figure?

Lowes Corporation Co-chairman Andrew Tisch wrote a June 26 op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal, titled:

Let's Ban the Word 'Trillion'

U.S. national debt is $15,800,000,000,000. Our lingo shouldn't obscure how dangerous that is.

Here's an edited excerpt from that article:

Pop quiz: What's bigger—$15.8 trillion, or $15,772,177,351,447?

Of course, rounding off, they're about the same. But don't we all think that the first number seems so much smaller and more manageable than the second?

The first number incorporates a tidy unit of measurement called a "trillion." We can get our heads around the word "trillion," and so we think we understand what we're looking at. In this case, it is the size of our national debt.

When you look at the nighttime sky, think about this: We used to know of a few million stars. Then we moved up to billions of stars. Now we're up to billions of galaxies. But we haven't gotten to trillions of many things uniquely identifiable yet.

Except dollars.

If you want to see a trillion dollars of those Benjamin Franklins, you need to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere and keep on going—678 miles high. Our national debt, at 15.8 times that amount, would form a stack of $100 bills 10,712 miles high.

That's why this enormous number is trivialized by shortening it to a word that has only one more letter than its much more benign cousins, "million" or "billion."

So let's ban the word "trillion." It's a unit of measurement neither understood nor appreciated. If we must use the number, we should give it its proper due. Write it out with all its zeros—all 12 of them. So $15.8 trillion would be $15,800,000,000,000.

This op-ed piece published just two days ago. But as the rapidly moving debt clock shows, the debt has already climbed some $38,000,000,000.

U.S. total debt is much higher: $56,922,000,000,000.

That much debt is unsustainable. And, as Elliott Wave International sees it, there's only one way out: a deflationary depression.

Webster's dictionary defines deflation as "a contraction in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods."

Elliott Wave International adds that "falling prices are a consequence of deflation, caused by debt destruction, bankruptcy, banking contraction and other manifestations of de-leveraging."

We face a worldwide, record-busting, deflationary credit crisis.

The Elliott Wave Theorist, May-June 2012

The credit crisis is global.

On March 27, 2012, CNBC listed the world's biggest debtor nations. Besides the United States, here are some of those countries and their gross external debt (in U.S. dollars):

Ireland: $2,260,000,000,000
United Kingdom: $10,157,000,000,000
Switzerland: $1,332,000,000,000
Netherlands: $2,590,000,000,000
Belgium: $1,457,000,000,000
Hong Kong: $939,830,000,000
France: $5,632,000,000,000
Portugal: $511,940,000,000
Germany: $5,674,000,000,000
Greece: $546,920,000,000
Spain: $2,392,000,000,000
Australia: $1,283,000,000,000
Italy: $2,494,000,000,000

The "debt can" that's long been kicked down the road will soon hit a brick wall.

If you think the world's central banks will bail us out, including the Federal Reserve in the United States, consider what the NEW July Elliott Wave Financial Forecast says:

The Fed's Money Pump is Broken

That's the title of a chart in the Economy and Deflation section of this just-published issue, which also presents a sub-section titled:

Suddenly, Failure Is an Option in Europe

The Financial Forecast and The Elliott Wave Theorist will prepare you for the depths of a deflationary depression, which will look and feel vastly different from even the struggling economic scene today.

Learn how you can get both of these publications via a special $29 risk-free trial offer (yours for 30 days!). Act now>>

Tags: credit crisis, debt crisis, debt downgrade, deflation, Elliott wave, Sovereign Debt

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