The numbers you're offering illustrate the exact point. Our systems work okay when you have exponential growth which can keep pace with the growth of debt. But

The numbers you're offering illustrate the exact point. Our systems work okay when you have exponential growth which can keep pace with the growth of debt. But assuming infinite exponential growth is unreasonable. The question is not if, but when the exponential growth ends. I tend to believe we're getting extremely close to that point already. ---- On a more fundamental level money itself is debt. It's how nearly all money is actually 'made.' Think about how banks function. #1 deposits $100 in a bank. That bank is required to only hold onto 10% of this deposit, and so they can and do lend $90 to #2. #2 spends that money which ends up getting deposited at another bank. That bank now lends out $81 to #3 (keeping 10% of that $90 on hand). And this process repeats over and over. In the end $100 of 'real' money ends up creating $1000 of debt. And now add in interest -- that single $100 can actually end up creating thousands of dollars of debt. The vast majority of all money in our economy is somebody else's debt. This is one of the main reasons inflation is seen as so important. It decreases the value of older debts, and also works as a penalty for simply holding onto assets as opposed to spending them and keeping the scheme going. The next issue is that now a days nearly all wealth is in the form of financial assets which naturally inflate their 'real' value. The current market cap of Apple is $920 billion. And that's made a lot of people a lot of wealth. But the issue is that if any substantial amount of that was attempted to be liquidated, the price would obviously plummet - precipitously. And of course this is the same for all financial assets. And then we get to financial policy. When having literally 0 interest rates was insufficient to get those assets to inflate enough on their own to show growth, we turned to quantitative easing which is effectively buying things with monopoly money in a last-ditch desperate effort to make their price go up. Is this indicative of a sustainable and healthy system?