The decline of empires. Is America next?

By Rick Ehrlich

Too big for your britches?

On January 21, 2026, Danish pension fund AkademikerPension announced they will sell its massive U.S. Treasury bond holdings, citing the USA’s poor credit quality and obvious inability to ever repay its debt. (CBS News). Same day (Reuters), Alecta Pension Fund of Sweden announced liquidating $8.8 billion of their US Treasury notes. China has recently sold half of its once held $1.4 trillion of US debt (Treasury.gov). Foreign countries presently hold over $9 trillion of our total $38 trillion of debt, or 25% of it. This seems to be the start of a “run on the bank.” Will we implode suddenly, or slowly crumble away because of debt we cannot pay, and resulting currency value crash? Are we going the way of the British Empire? The Spanish Empire? How about Rome? Han China? The Mongols? The Ottomans? Or the Maurya Empire of India? All of these died from financial difficulties, war and over-expansion. By the way, the Soviet Union died from financial ruin even though it never expanded.

All of the above went bust…they generally expanded, borrowed, made war, and expanded, borrowed, made war and expanded, thinking there is no limit…. until they no longer could control their empire, and were financially strangled. (The USSR was financially strangled by its arms race with America. The USA has borrowed, made war, borrowed more, made more war, and now our leader says we’ll expand by 23% in geographical size by adding (buying) Greenland. With this no-limit strategy, and the fact of the USA’s huge/growing annual deficit, it seems obvious we will be unable to repay, and in fact will never pay off our national debt. Instead, the debt will further grow rapidly by policy every year until a financial explosive disaster occurs. Of course it will. Our Debt to GDP ratio (now 124%) increases every year. Our President recently announced he will ask for a further increase in our bloated Defense budget by $500 billion annually! So far, they haven’t yet shown the cost to “develop” Greenland, or new extraordinary rights in Greenland. Meanwhile, American manufacturing is gone except for making bombs and bullets; our biggest growth sector is homelessness.

What could possibly prevent our crash and ruin? We only have two political parties, both of which always support the continuation of expensive programs resulting in ever larger budget deficits (by definition, increasing the debt total). Our two giant political parties are EQUALLY guilty for our national insolvency. When our debtholders like the Scandinavian pension funds wake up and stop rolling the USA debt over (refinancing it at each note’s maturity date), the music will stop, starting probably the world’s biggest ever financial crisis. Since no outside party will then risk buying our bonds, our government will need to issue new fiat currency to cover our bonds… those maturing, and new borrowings. This will create runaway inflation, like the German hyper-inflation of the 1920s. The strong American Empire will exist no more.

There are only three things that could possibly correct the deficincy and prevent the “run”, and since our yearly deficit is so huge, they must all three be done together. But unfortunately, not a single one will be done because of our national politics. These are (1) a massive reduction (like 75%) of military/defense outlays, (2) actual balancing of entitlement payments, by limiting them to amounts paid in — mainly worker and employer contributions to Social Security and Medicare, and (3) taxing our highest earners much higher, as was done before the Reagan administration. It will not matter whether you are a liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, when our American Empire dies; we will all be dirt poor and our country powerless after the fall.

Related Posts

About author

Related Posts

Leave a Reply

Do not miss