These days, everyone is looking at the debt crisis in the United States. The massive net new debt that the government in Washington is pushing ahead with is causing the financial markets to tremble. At the same time, a fire is smouldering in the eurozone that almost no one is prepared to report on, and then there is the politically avoided issue of the unfunded payment obligations of individual countries' pension funds. As the chart shows, these figures have already reached a level in 2021 that makes it difficult for us as economists to classify them as manageable.
And yet, to date, we have not been able to register any major symptoms of crisis in this inherently ailing Ponzi scheme. So are the friends of the MMT movement right? Can every social problem really be solved with the money printer? The latest figures on the productivity development of the economies in Germany, Japan and the United States indicate that the crowding-out effect that this interest rate manipulation entails will kill the economy in the long term. The crisis will come suddenly, there is no glide path to it.