National Debt & Americans

“The national debt?” muses our friend Doug Casey. “When was the last time you heard any average person worry about the national debt? Americans have become so used to carrying huge loads of debt around -- right out of college with student loans -- that it doesn't even occur to them that there could be any reason for concern over the national debt. It's an abstraction, like the number of light-years to the Andromeda Galaxy.
“Now it's even more dangerous, because the U.S. government owes it mostly to foreigners: the Chinese, the Japanese, the Taiwanese and so forth. And they won't like it if they are left holding a bunch of worthless IOUs at the end of this experiment.
“It's not just the Chinese and Japanese governments that are going to be unhappy. But hundreds of millions of individuals around the world -- in places from Russia to the Congo, to Mexico, to Thailand -- that have a trillion of the things under their mattresses, because they justifiably don't trust their own government's paper are going to be even more unhappy with the U.S.
“This is big trouble. It's not just another economic downturn when scores of millions find their life savings go ‘poof.’ What we're looking at is a cataclysm at some point soon.”