Ferguson: Debt Burden May Destroy US Empire

By: Dan Weil

Empires can come and go very quickly, with fiscal crises often doing them in, says Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson.

That’s bad news for the United States, because it’s running a budget deficit of about 10 percent of GDP and a debt burden of about 60 percent of GDP.

“The U.S. is on a completely unsustainable fiscal course, with no apparent political means of self-correcting,” Ferguson writes in The Australian newspaper.

And that puts the American empire at risk, he says.

“The most obvious point is that imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises: sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, and the mounting cost of servicing a mountain of public debt.” (more)