Who's Going To Buy America's 40 Trillion Dollar Debt?

Elena Reyes: Welcome back to Outside the Dollar. I'm Elena Reyes. Markets look calm on the surface, stocks near highs, volatility low. But underneath, there is more tension building than some may realize. Today we're pulling on four threads and they all point the same direction. First, Jamie Dimon telling CNBC this week he wouldn't touch stocks or long-dated Treasurys at current prices. That's a heavy statement from him. Second, a Goldman Sachs note suggesting China's real gold buying might be running well past what Beijing reports officially, worth asking why. Third, we'll look at what large patient buyers seem to be doing during the recent pullback in gold and silver, and fourth, the debt picture; the U.S. is closing in on forty trillion dollars, and that number matters for anyone holding or Speaker 2: buying U.S. government debt, or debt denominated in dollars. Elena Reyes: or thinking about holding hard assets. Four threads, one show. Let's start with Dimon, since he's the one making headlines right now. What exactly is he saying markets are getting wrong? Stocks near record highs, bond yields calm and the man running the biggest bank in the country says he wouldn't touch either one at today's prices. Over the next few segments, we're tracing one thread: who's quietly getting ready for trouble while headlines seem optimistic. China's buying gold at a pace official numbers don't fully capture. Central banks are stacking reserves during a pullback most retail investors are avoiding. are avoiding, and underneath it all sits a debt number getting too large to overlook. But let's start with the warning. Jamie Dimon sat down with CNBC's Wilfred Frost for an hour-long interview released Monday, and he didn't hedge: He told Frost he wouldn't buy stocks or long-dated Treasuries at current prices. Coming from most people, that's an opinion. Coming from the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, That's a signal. His reasoning? Markets are pricing in calm while the actual risk list keeps growing-wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, tariff friction, and a fiscal picture in Washington that isn't improving. Quote, I do think those risks are probably bigger than other people think," Dimon told CNBC. Notice Dimon isn't calling a crash-he's calling attention to a gap. Gap-The gap between what markets are charging for risk and what risk actually exists in the world right now. Those are two different things, and mixing them up is how portfolios get surprised. If someone with Dimon seat at the table is stepping back from both stocks and treasuries, where does that capital go instead, and who's already been moving there, quietly, while the rest of the market wasn't paying attention? Speaker 3: Thank you for watching. Elena Reyes: With that question about capital hanging there, let's follow it into gold demand. Investing Live reported on a Goldman Sachs note this week, and the numbers are striking. Goldman estimates China bought roughly 48 metric tons of gold through the London OTC market in May alone. That's nearly five times what China's central bank officially disclosed about ten tons. Building on that accumulation story, let's zoom out to the bigger picture. Gold's had a challenging five months, but look at the longer arc. That same key note's physical gold has outperformed the U.S. stock market since 2000, and it's up over 1,000% over the last 26 years. Does that make sense? Short-term pain, a much stronger record if you held through it. So what do people actually do with that information? Advisors cited in that wealth management piece talk about something like 5 to 10% of a portfolio in gold. Ray Dalio's floated numbers as high as 15%. Your time horizon, your other holdings, your goals, all of that changes the math. Here's what I keep coming back to, though. These allocation debates aren't. They aren't really about gold's chart, they're about what's sitting on the other side of the portfolio: cash, bonds, the dollar itself. And that pulls us toward something bigger than any single asset. The U.S. is closing in on forty trillion dollars in debt according to Lear Capital's read on the Treasury Department's own tracker. Who's actually financing that? Building on that debt thread I mentioned, let's put real numbers on it. The U.S. Treasury's own live tracker has the national debt closing in on $40 trillion. Lear Capital pulled that figure straight from Treasury data this week. Here's the piece that gets buried under the headline number. The Congressional Budget Office projects the federal government will spend about $7.4 trillion in fiscal 2026. While collecting roughly $5.6 trillion in revenue, that gap—about $1.9 trillion—has to be borrowed every single year. So who actually buys that debt? Individuals through savings bonds, commercial banks, pension funds, foreign governments, Japan and China among the largest holders historically, and the Federal Reserve itself when it's expanding its balance sheet. sheet. Treasury securities are in the simplest sense IOUs. Somebody has to be willing to hold the other side of that paper. Now think about what happens as more of that borrowing rolls over at today's higher rates. Net interest on the debt is running near $1 trillion a year in 2026. Federal projections put that climbing toward $2.1 trillion by 2036. That's not a hypothetical. That's a bill coming due, on top of everything else Washington already spends. Does that automatically mean higher inflation or higher rates down the road? No, and I want to be careful here, because that's a real jump in logic that gets made too casually. Rising debt could pressure taxes, benefits, borrowing costs, even the dollar's purchasing power over time. It doesn't guarantee any of it. There are scenarios where growth outpaces the debt burden. There are scenarios where it doesn't. Nobody gets to skip that uncertainty. Which brings the whole hour full circle. Dimon's warning that markets are underpricing risk, China's buying gold well beyond the official tally, central banks stacking reserves in May at a pace that more than doubled the month before-gold's own track record through five months of Speaker 2: power. Speaker 4: of pullback and decades of outperformance, what connects all of it is a pretty simple idea: Gold has no government issuer standing behind it and no counterparty risk-nobody's IOU, nobody's balance sheet. Elena Reyes: And the long run number is worth sitting with: gold averaged around two hundred seventy nine dollars an ounce back in two thousand; on July twenty second of this year, it traded near four thousand one hundred Speaker 2: forty. Elena Reyes: $145. That's a move of roughly 1,385%. If you want to talk through what a position in gold or silver could look like for your own situation, Lear Capital has specialists who walk through that with no obligation. Text DOLLAR to 433-433. Here's what I'd sit with this week. $40 trillion in debt, $2 trillion a year in interest by the mid-2030s. Whose actually going to keep buying that paper, and at what price? Speaker 4: Dimon's warning about stocks and treasuries, China's gold buying that might be running far above the official numbers, central banks stepping up purchases during this pullback-none of it proves anything on its own. But add in debt near forty trillion dollars and deficits climbing, and you've got concrete questions about currencies and purchasing power. Gold's long-term record through all of that is hard to ignore. None of this is a guaranteed answer, but researching physical gold and silver as one piece of a diversified plan seems worth your time. Want Lear Capital's research? Text DOLLAR to 43343 for your free investor kit or visit learcapital.com. Thanks for listening. Talk soon.