Professor Niall Ferguson: US Unfunded Liabilities Top $238 TRILLION !!

• Niall Ferguson: US Unfunded Liabilities Top $238 TRILLION!! 
  by http://www.silverdoctors.com/ 
  Somehow we missed this over the summer. In an excellent economic lecture series presented by the BBC, economic historian (& author of the recent Newsweek piece Hit the Road Barack) Niall Ferguson states that the total US unfunded liabilities is a mind-blowing $238 TRILLION– over 16 times the total US debt claimed by the Treasury Department of $16 trillion!! Can you say QE to INFINITY….AND BEYOND!!! ?  There is simply no other viable solution. Ferguson’s full lectures can be downloaded here:
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  The rapidly rising quantity of these bonds certainly implies a growing charge on those in employment, now and in the future, since – even if the current low rates of interest enjoyed by the biggest sovereign borrowers persist – the amount of money needed to service the debt must inexorably rise.
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  But the official debts in the form of bonds do not include the often far larger unfunded liabilities of welfare schemes like – to give the biggest American schemes – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
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  The most recent estimate for the difference between the net present value of federal government liabilities and the net present value of future federal revenues is $200 trillion, nearly thirteen times the debt as stated by the U.S. Treasury.
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  Notice that these figures, too, are incomplete, since they omit the unfunded liabilities of state and local governments, which are estimated to be around $38 trillion.
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  read more!

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