The U.S. national debt has doubled over the past decade, rising from $17.64 trillion at the end of 2014 to $35.35 trillion this week. To put that in perspective, the national debt is now so massive it costs the federal government $3 billion per day just to pay the interest—a little more than the annual GDP of Belize.
The situation has become so bleak that business leaders are speaking out, including Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan. The veteran banker called on politicians to address the ever-expanding national debt sooner rather than later in an Axios interview published Tuesday.
“We need our eyes and stomach aligned as a country. We've got to balance the budget like anybody, any company, any person, any household," he said.
This isn’t the first time Moynihan has spoken out about the need to reduce the national debt. In February, Moynihan warned it was “past time” for lawmakers to get the U.S. on a sustainable fiscal path. “You can admire the problem or you can do something about it, so we have to get after that,” he said on a Teneo Insights podcast released Feb. 5.
Moynihan is far from the only bank CEO who has expressed concern about the national debt. In January, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon compared the federal government’s surging deficit to running 60 miles per hour toward a “cliff,” warning that the U.S. faces a global market “rebellion” if lawmakers don’t change their policies.
Dimon, and numerous Wall Street veterans including Ed Yardeni, fear that as the U.S. national debt continues to soar, investors will begin to demand more interest to compensate for the increased risk of holding U.S. Treasuries, which would make servicing the national debt even more costly for the federal government.
Yardeni, who spent decades on Wall Street and now runs the investment research firm Yardeni Research, coined the term “bond vigilantes” in 1983 to describe investors who “may protest profligate fiscal policy” by demanding more interest to hold Treasuries.
In an October interview with Fortune, he warned that with the current path of the national debt, these investors will eventually say: “‘No más, no more. You gotta do something about these out of control deficits.’”
Yardeni’s concerns are far from unique on Wall Street. A number of well-known economists, analysts, and hedge funders have been sounding the alarm about the national debt for years now. Mark Spitznagel, the hedge funder known for preparing for market-moving, unpredictable “black swan” events, told Fortune earlier this year that the national debt has helped create a fragile “tinderbox economy” in the U.S. But beyond that, the founder and CIO of Universa Investments argued there’s “something immoral” about current generations leaving their children with the bill for their overspending.
“We have been just incredibly irresponsible to future generations. They played no part in this, and yet they will bear the burden,” he said. “We should all feel really, really bad about it…It’s gonna hurt people that aren’t even alive today. How is that right?”
The surging national debt has even attracted the attention of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who called for an “adult conversation” about fiscal responsibility earlier this year in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes”. Echoing Spitznagel, Powell rebuked lawmakers for “effectively borrowing from future generations” with their “unsustainable” policies.
Despite critiques from economists, CEOs, Wall Street leaders, and even the Fed Chair, neither leading candidate for president has put forward policies that would help control the national debt.
A recent analysis from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School found the national deficit will expand no matter who is elected. Under Trump’s tax and spending proposals, the deficit would jump $5.8 trillion over the next 10 years, while under a Harris administration, it would increase by $1.2 trillion over the same period, they found.
When it comes to finding a solution to the U.S.’s national debt, Bank of America’s Moynihan said we need to take action now, while “we’re in relatively good times”—implying that if the economy takes a turn for the worse, it will nearly impossible to control spending or raise taxes.
"Policy choices have to be made: revenue-side issues, like taxation, to spending-side issues, and the efficiency of the government itself. All of those things have to be on the table,” he told Axios.
