US Treasury to Borrow $3 Trillion, Five Times What It Borrowed in 2008, And Counting

In terms of financial impact, the fallout from the coronavirus lockdown is now officially worse than anything since the Great Depression, and it’s not over yet.

One cannot print land, bonds or businesses, and so printing money will not reduce the value of those who own investments or means of production. It will, however, reduce the purchasing power of people who depend on income from salaries, and not on rents from ownership.

Inflation is a form of taxation, and like all taxes, there’s a loophole for the extremely wealthy. Someone has to pay for that corona bailout, and that someone is you.

The Economic Times:

The United States Treasury department said it plans to borrow USD 2.9 trillion during the April-June quarter to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

It’s $2.99 trillion, so round up to $3 trillion. In America, even the Treasury does psychological pricing.

According to The Wall Street Journal, this is five times of what the United States borrowed at the peak of the 2008 financial crisis.

During the April-June quarter, the US Treasury expects to borrow USD 2.9 trillion in privately-held net marketable debt, assuming an end-of-June cash balance of USD 800 billion, an official statement said on Monday.

“The increase in privately-held net marketable borrowing is primarily driven by the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, including expenditures from new legislation to assist individuals and businesses, changes to tax receipts, including the deferral of individual and business taxes from April-June until July, and an increase in the assumed end-of-June Treasury cash balance,” it said.

The borrowing estimate is USD 3,055 billion higher than what was announced in February this year, the US Treasury said.

The claim, so far, is that about 60,000 Americans, almost all of them chronically ill or elderly, have died so far of the corona flu.

If we divide this $3 trillion into that bodycount, that adds up to fifty million dollars ($50,000,000) per fatality. Obviously, if the goal was to keep the chronically ill and elderly alive, you could have put all of them in a full Ebola-style quarantine for much less.

Apparently, no one ran those numbers.

They are going to borrow more after this. All of that does not even capture the losses that business and individuals have eaten and which the government has not made up for, which is most of the total cost of this shutdown.

All of this to prevent hospitals from being “overwhelmed” by the same number of people who die of the flu. Except the hospitals don’t have any way to treat these people, besides giving them rest, fluids, painkillers and cough syrup – basically, keeping them comfortable while the disease runs its course. For all the fuss about ventilators, around 80% of people put on ventilators die anyway.

But it’s very important that they die in a hospital, which must not be overwhelmed – so everything had to be shut down, until there are no new cases of respiratory infection, because all respiratory infections are now Covid-19.

Sorry, no time for questions.

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