 Hello and welcome to another edition of the Minor Issues Podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. In this week's podcast, I'm going to do a recap of the financial condition of our government and as individuals here in the country, as we are perhaps already in an economic recession or soon to be in one. Starting with the U.S. Treasury, I would note that at the end of COVID in the second quarter of 2022, the government was borrowing $763 billion at an annualized basis. Today, in the second quarter of 2023, the government is borrowing $2,611 billion on an annualized basis. And since then, at the end of July, the Treasury announced that it was going to increase the size of all of its debt auctions. And then on November 1st, we were told that there would be an increase of all of the auctions once again. So the short-term bills, the various notes of many years' lengths of five years and seven years, as well as 10 years and 30 year government bonds. In this quarter, the government is borrowing approximately $766 billion for the last quarter of this year, which amounts to over $3 trillion on an annualized basis. And then if we look at the first quarter estimate for government borrowing, we see that in the first quarter of 2024, the government plans to borrow $816 billion or $3.25 trillion on an annualized basis. Now, just for some perspective, when I was born, the U.S. government debt total was about less than $400 billion. And in 1970, while we were still on the gold standard, total government borrowing was still less than $400 billion. Yet, within a decade, the debt had risen to $900 billion. A decade later, it was $3 trillion. In the year 2000, it was $5.5 trillion. In 2010, it was over $12 trillion. Right before COVID in 2019, it was $23 trillion. And in the second quarter of 2023, there was a total government debt of $32.3 trillion. And checking the national debt clock today, national debt is $33.7 trillion, an increase of almost $1.5 trillion in less than a year's time. Even though we're not paying off this debt, we're only adding to it interest on the national debt. Now is almost $700 billion a year. Looking at the Fed's quantitative tightening policy, which no one really talks about anymore, this is where all the money that the Fed invested in government bonds and in mortgage-backed securities during the great financial crisis, we see that the Fed's balance sheet prior to the great financial crisis was less than a trillion dollars. And if we look at it prior to COVID, it was still less than $4 trillion. At the maximum during COVID, the Fed's balance sheet was just less than $9 trillion in the summer of 2022. For all of the crying and moaning about the quantitative tightening policy of the Fed, the Fed still has a balance sheet of approximately $8 trillion. And during that process of the Fed raising rates and selling off government bonds and mortgage-backed securities, has left the Fed with a negative balance sheet and actually losing money. It's hard to imagine that somebody who can print up money as much as they want could be losing money, but they're losing value on all those bonds, government bonds and mortgage-backed securities that they had purchased. In the past, of course, they usually made money while spending tons of money on themselves and turning over all of their, quote, profits, unquote, to the U.S. Treasury. Now they're losing, on an annual basis, over $100 billion on their portfolio, and those losses are expected to peak at over $200 billion. So the status of our government going into this recession is a very poor one. And unfortunately, the status financially of Americans is not much better. Student loan debt is almost $2 trillion, or over $41,000 for every student. And of course, repayments of student loans are set to begin shortly. In terms of credit card debts, total credit card debt of Americans is $1.3 trillion, or an average balance of over $8,000 per credit card holder. In the meantime, household mortgage debt has increased by over 25% since the peak of the housing bubble back in 2008. So homeowners are suffering from much higher mortgage rates right now, but with that credit card debt of Americans of holding over $8,000 on average, and I know a lot of people don't hold a balance on their credit cards, but the interest rate on credit cards has also increased. So during COVID lockdown period, interest rates on credit cards were less than 15%. Today they've risen sharply, and the average interest rate on credit cards is now over 21%. So it is really the case that both the government and as private individuals, we are in much worse financial shape going into this recession. And that's unfortunate. There's less room for people to maneuver individually, as well as our government.