America is living on borrowed time

Hey zxcv, it’s Mark.

If you look at America right now, you’ll see 2 completely different countries.

The first one looks like a golden age with stock markets at record highs, low unemployment, and a growing GDP.

The second one looks like the build up of every major financial crisis in history.

So which version is the real one?

Well, the truth is, the US economy isn’t really thriving, and it’s also not collapsing just yet, because it’s being held up by 6 pillars, with cracks running up the side of every single one of them.

So let’s unpack the 6 supports together, because by the end of this email, you’ll understand the US economy better than 95% of people.

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SUPPORT 1: THE AI SPENDING BUBBLE

Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta alone are allocating somewhere between 660 and 725 billion dollars on ‘capital expenditure’ in 2026.

It’s the biggest infrastructure build out in American history.

According to David Sacks, Trump’s AI adviser, he recently said around 75% of all US GDP growth in Q1 of 2026 came from this AI capex alone. So if you strip the spending of these 4 companies out of the GDP number, the rest of the US economy is basically flat.

The headline GDP number that politicians wave around and use to say the economy’s doing great, only looks great because of one industry, and more specifically, 4 companies.

Without them, the US would technically be in a recession.

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SUPPORT 2: THE WEALTH EFFECT

According to data from the Federal Reserve and Moody’s, the top 10 percent of US households are now responsible for nearly 50% of all consumer spending, which is the highest share since they started tracking this number in 1989.

The bottom 50% of households, which is around 170 million Americans, account for just a fraction of what the top 10% are spending each month.

When you watch your stock portfolio go up or your house becomes worth more than it was last year, naturally you feel richer, and because you feel richer, you spend more.

Consumer spending as a whole makes up around 70% of total US GDP. So if the top 10% felt poor for even one quarter of the year, US consumer spending, and the economy with it, would just collapse.

We’re at a stage now where the rich aren’t just contributing to the economy, they are the economy.

And this is a problem. When the market goes up, people spend. And when the market drops, people naturally stop.

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SUPPORT 3: THE CREDIT LIFELINE

Credit card balances in the US just hit a record shy of 1.3 trillion dollars. Buy now, pay later has become a 100 billion dollar industry, and subprime auto loans are through the roof.

And this debt isn’t just for fancy vacations and cars. It’s for groceries, fuel, insurance, and rent… basically all the essentials.

Missed credit card payments recently hit a 13 year high, subprime auto repossessions are spiking, and over 40% of buy now pay later users are now missing payments.

You can’t outrun rising prices with a credit card forever. There is a credit limit, and an interest rate, and eventually you have to choose between paying the minimum payment and putting petrol in your tank.

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SUPPORT 4: THE GOVERNMENT DEFICIT MACHINE

Most people think the economy is driven by consumers buying stuff, but a huge amount of economic spending is actually the government itself.

Every year, the federal government spends about 2 trillion dollars more than it takes in, and that 2 trillion dollars flows into the economy through defence contracts, Medicare reimbursements, federal salaries, highway projects, social security cheques and more.

The result is a government that can’t really raise taxes much more without crushing growth, can’t easily cut spending without a political disaster, and is paying 3 billion dollars a day just to stand still on its existing debt.

How can a government with 39 trillion in debt and trillion dollar deficits keep borrowing more and more year after year and not face a currency collapse?

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SUPPORT 5: THE DOLLAR’S SHIELD

Now, I know that might sound a bit crazy, but this is actually the single most important thing keeping the entire American system standing.

The US dollar is the global reserve currency, which means almost all international trade, like oil, copper, wheat, microchips, and so much more is priced and settled in dollars.

This created an almost infinite demand for dollars and by extension, US Treasury bonds, which is what allows the US to borrow at a scale that would’ve bankrupted any other country on earth.

But this pillar is starting to crack, and it’s happening faster than most Americans realise.

Because the US has spent the last 20 years weaponising the dollar against any country it disagrees with. I’m talking Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and even Chinese tech firms. These countries are now actively building alternative payment systems, like BRICS.

And then there’s gold. Central banks bought a record amount of gold in 2022, 2023 and 2024, which has continued into 2026 as fears about US debt, dollar dominance and geopolitical instability show no sign of easing.

Gold is up over 80% in the last 2 years, and it’s not retail traders like you and I pushing the price, it’s sovereign nations methodically diversifying away from a currency they no longer trust.

The dollar’s dominance hasn’t ended, but the trust that took 80 years to build is slowly being chipped away, and once it’s gone, it doesn’t come back quickly… if at all.

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SUPPORT 6: THE POLITICAL SAFETY NET

Every panic is being met with an emergency package, an executive order, or a ‘Truth Social’ post that reverses whatever scared the market in the first place.

Investors don’t believe in real risk anymore, because every time they have been wrong over the past 15 years, the government has been there with their safety net.

This is the psychological glue holding the whole thing together. Even if the other 5 supports are stretched paper thin, people don’t sell, because they assume the government will always show up. And so far, they’ve been right.

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THE BIG PICTURE:

For years now, these 6 supports have slowly been getting strained, but nothing in the world has been big enough to actually test all 6 of them at once.

That was until February 28th this year when ‌missiles started flying between the US and Iran.

The US economy hasn’t collapsed yet because so far the supports have held, but the longer they hold under this kind of pressure, the bigger the eventual reckoning will be when one of them gives way.

The US still has the world’s reserve currency, the deepest capital markets on earth, and some of the most innovative companies in history. Which buys you time, but it doesn’t buy you forever.

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zxcv, what do you think will happen to the US economy in the long term? I’d love to know, so hit reply to this email.

All the best,

Mark Tilbury