One thing my economics professor taught me is that it’s about relative position across alternatives.

The reason the US continues to grow and thrive despite insane debt is that other countries are worse. Try investing $100B in other markets stably. Now do that 100 times and the chaos of the US is preferred due to the massive debt of other countries, corruption, etc

The problem for the U.S. is that it’s becoming very much like those other countries.

We’ve lost all fiscal policy stability.

Central bank independence is being severely threatened.

Tax rates are all over the place.

Tariffs are all over the place.

Any industry/company can either be bailed out or completely destroyed based on the whims of the President (Spirit Airlines bailed out for no good reason, and offshore wind energy destroyed for good reason just as an example).

Some may like to think that this is a temporary problem, given the US’s historical fiscal and regulatory stability, but the problem with such actions is that once the floodgates are opened they’re very difficult to close back.

It will be hard for the next President, irrespective of which party they’re in, to resist engaging in similar actions. Heck, even if they’re the most upright individual, they would have to engage in arbitrary executive actions simply to undo some of the actions we have already seen, never mind what we will see for another couple of years.

There are people from scores of countries across the world that will tell us that once corruption slips in at the top, it’s very hard to stop it growing like a cancer.