The United States national debt is well over $14 trillion, and with Japan being a major holder of our debt and the disaster that unfolded recently, there is a lot of concern about the effects it will have on America.
According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, as of January 2011, the amount of debt held by foreign countries is $4.4 trillion. China owns $1.1 trillion of Treasury securities, Japan is second with nearly $886 billion, and Britain is a distant third with $278 billion. If Japan were to repatriate their assets, what would be the result?
There would no doubt be a huge problem – we have no money and our economy still has yet to fully recover from the economic crisis of 2008.
How would we pay this debt back – more borrowing from China? Please.
This has to be the biggest problem to come out of this whole thing in regard to America.
Now, we should definitely provide as much aid as possible. There should be no argument to the contrary, as Japan has been one of our best allies in the past, but we should first look at our economic situation and whether or not we could afford to pay back Japan if we need to. The fact is, we couldn’t.
How will this affect the future of our country if we were forced by other world powers to honor our debt? If we were to honor our debt, which we should, it would surely lead to a domino effect of countries repatriating their U.S. Treasury assets. Japan isn’t even the biggest holder of American assets.
What if something major was to happen to China and they were to call in their debt?
This would have a profound effect on our future. There is no way we as American people can believe that our country will stay on top of the world’s political landscape with a debt as high as ours, and with the largest foreign holder of that debt such an influential world leader like China.
From ancient Rome to the British Empire, the world empires have held the top spot for roughly the same amount of time. America is approaching that time and its downfall, unless we deal with this problem head-on.
It is naive to think that events around the world, like the Japanese tsunami, will not have any consequences on our country with all of the money we owe the other world powers.
The world economy is a house of cards just waiting to collapse; all it takes is one country to go for all the rest to follow. The only possible result would be the fall of the American Empire and the rise of China to the top spot.
Our empire, and you must consider us an empire when you acknowledge the fact that we have military bases in more than 130 countries, is coming to a close – and the catastrophe in Japan might of just helped speed it up.