How Debt Destroys Empires: A Familiar Pattern
The typical pattern in these examples of collapsing empires (and numerous others I didn’t have time to mention) is:
Stage #1: Empires achieve success and become overconfident.
Stage #2: Overconfidence leads to extravagant spending on luxuries and wars.
Stage #3: Empires finance this lavish spending by going into debt.
Stage #4: The debt grows to an unsustainable level and creates a crushing burden.
Stage #5: Empires finance the debt through taxation and currency debasement.
Stage #6: The populace bears the brunt of debt repayment as empires raise taxes and debase the currency—to the maximum extent—until it causes internal instability.
Stage #7: Empires cannot finance their militaries because of their debt burden. This is usually the tipping point.
Stage #8: Underfunded militaries plus internal instability make empires vulnerable to foreign invasion, domestic revolution, civil war, and other existential dangers.
Stage #9: The empire collapses.
The US federal government has the biggest debt in the history of the world. And it’s continuing to grow at a rapid, unstoppable pace.
While the US government can extend the charade of solvency longer than any other entity on the planet, not even the most powerful empires in human history can do so forever, particularly when they start to struggle to pay the interest costs.
The situation has reached a tipping point.
That’s because the federal debt’s annualized interest cost exceeded the defense budget for the first time last year.
It’s on track to exceed Social Security and become the BIGGEST item in the federal budget.
As a result, the US Empire is somewhere between
Stage #6 and
#7 in the empire collapse pattern I described above.
History rarely repeats in perfect detail—but it
does rhyme, and the rhyme is getting louder.
When an empire hits the late stages of the debt cycle, the real damage doesn’t arrive with a headline or a single crash. It shows up in the quiet erosion of purchasing power, the creeping "emergency" policies, and the accelerating need to debase currency just to keep the machine running.
If the US really is drifting from Stage #6 toward Stage #7, then this isn’t just an abstract history lesson—it’s a live setup.
And the people who come through periods like this intact are usually the ones who recognize the pattern early and position themselves before the crowd is forced to react.