By Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds

The global economy is now addicted to debt. Once debt stops expanding, the economy shrivels. But expanding debt forever is unsustainable. Welcome to the endgame.

The purpose of this chart is to examine the relationship of total debt to GDP. Since Debt is not factored into GDP, just exactly how much debt is being used to create growth, and over what time periods. But absolute numbers don’t work so well, since they don’t let you examine particular years, seeing what the 1950s look like vs the 2000s, for example.

Red Line: Annual Change in TCMDO (Total Credit Market Debt Owed) * 100/ That year’s total GDP, showing that year’s % increase in TCMDO/GDP.
Blue line: % change in GDP over last year.

Any gap between the red line and the blue line is what I would call the creation of debt in excess of income. And that gap is the ANNUAL gap, not a cumulative gap. As an example, in 2008 TCMDO grew by an average of 30% of that year’s GDP, while GDP itself grew by around 5%. Ouch.

So projecting forward, how much debt growth do you think we’d need to get back to business as usual? 50s was 8%, 60s about 12%, 70s 15%, 80s maybe 20%, 90s back down to 15%, and 00s probably 25-30% per year. We’d probably need a surge of 35% or more, per year, to bring back those exciting bubble years. But who could possibly have the income to support that? To quote the parable of the Little Red Hen: “Not I”, said the goose.