US National Debt Shatters $38,500,000,000,000 As Billionaire Ken Griffin Says America Urgently Needs To ‘Put Fiscal House in Order’

The billionaire founder of hedge fund giant Citadel, Ken Griffin, is issuing a warning on America’s financial health as the US national debt approaches $39 trillion.

According to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Debt to the Penny dataset, the US national debt just reached $38.56 trillion, an increase of around $2.3 trillion in just one year.

Amid the ballooning national debt, Griffin tells the Wall Street Journal that the US needs to “increase fiscal discipline.”

“We’re late in an economic cycle. We don’t know if we’re in the sixth inning. Or seventh inning. Or eighth inning. But very few cycles run as long as this cycle has run. And we’re still running a significant deficit.

At this point in the economic cycle, we should be running close to break-even. If you’re not paying down your national debt at moments like this, when will you pay it down?

And the fact that we’re still running a very large annual deficit does tell you that too much [of] the economy is being supported by the sugar high of fiscal spending. We need to dial that back. We need to have more discipline in both spending and thoughtfulness. And how we generate revenues. Like we need to put our fiscal house in order.”

According to Griffin, the longer it takes to reduce the US national debt, the worse the consequences will be.

“Politicians deferring some of these decisions means that the impact of future decisions will be so much more painful for the American people.

…what we’re really doing is we’re not deferring some fixed amount of pain. We’re going to cause far more pain 20 years down the road.”

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