On the collapse of a system built on imaginary money, the debt that keeps us captive, and what the Sacred Embodied Human Animal has always known about real wealth.
Written by Stephanie Bacquet Mathews
I learned a word two days ago that I cannot stop thinking about. Insolvent. It means you do not have enough income to pay your bills. Not that you are struggling, not that you are cutting back, not that it is tight this month. It means the math is broken. The bills are higher than the money coming in, and you cannot close the gap.
America is officially insolvent.
Someone put the numbers into a context that finally landed for me. Imagine you earn $64,518 a year. Your bills are $85,671 a year. And you are $1.34 million in debt. You cannot pay your bills. You definitely cannot make a dent on the interest on that debt. That is where the United States sits right now, today. The national debt crossed $39 trillion this month, and the deficit grows by roughly $70,000 every single second. Not per minute. Per second.
Trump campaigned on eliminating the national debt. His business career offers a very clear model for how he approaches debt, and it is worth naming plainly: his companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy six documented times between 1991 and 2009, covering the Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Castle, Trump Plaza, the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, and Trump Entertainment Resorts. The pattern was consistent each time: leverage up, pull out, let the creditors absorb the losses, move on. Bondholders, small businesses, and workers absorbed the damage while Trump retained his name, his fees, and his next deal. He used the phrase himself: “We’ll throw it into a chapter. We’ll negotiate with the banks. We’ll make a fantastic deal.”
He is running the same play on a country.
While the average American is watching prices double at the grocery store, the people closest to the White House have been extracting wealth at a speed that should make your jaw drop.
Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Jr., are investors in multiple drone companies that have received hundreds of millions of dollars in Pentagon contracts, during a war their father started. Donald Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, backed Vulcan Elements, a 30-person startup, which received a $620 million loan from the Department of Defense; the largest loan in the history of the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital. That contract was awarded three months after 1789 invested in the company. Eric Trump invested in an Israeli drone maker called Xtend, which secured a multi-million-dollar Pentagon contract; those very drones were then used in combat in Iran, marking the first time the US military deployed one-way attack drones in combat. The sons were given investments. A war followed. The drones their companies sold were used in that war. The money flowed back.
A Project on Government Oversight analyst said it plainly: everyone making contract decisions knows exactly whose relatives are on the cap table. An ethics watchdog said the deals presented, at minimum, “the appearance of impropriety.” Impropriety means the appearance of dishonesty, corruption and misconduct.
Meanwhile, Trump’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, netted the family approximately $500 million after a deal with a company called Alt5 Sigma. The Trump family holds 75% of the proceeds from the token sales through a family LLC.
This is not a left or right issue. Even large pro-Trump accounts on social media asked plainly: “Raise your hand if you voted for Trump so his kids could make money off government contracts.”
Here is the anatomy of Insolvency. This is what the numbers actually show. The United States spent $7 trillion in fiscal year 2025 and collected $5.2 trillion in revenue. The deficit was $1.8 trillion, one of the four largest in American history, and larger than any deficit outside of a war, a recession, or a national emergency. We are in none of those, officially. We are simply spending vastly more than we take in during a period that should be, by economic metrics, a period of relative stability.
Interest payments on the national debt hit nearly $1 trillion in 2025 and are projected to break $1 trillion in 2026. Interest is now the fastest-growing expense in the federal budget. Nearly one dollar in five of federal revenue will soon go to paying interest alone, before a single road is fixed, before a single school receives funding, before a single veteran is treated. The Congressional Budget Office projects deficits reaching $3.1 trillion annually by 2036.
Ray Dalio, one of the most successful hedge fund managers in history, called this a “debt death spiral” and warned about the depreciation of the dollar specifically. The Treasury Department’s own annual financial report describes the US net position as negative $41.72 trillion. A Fortune commentary from a former Comptroller General used a word I had never heard applied to a nation before: insolvent.
“Convenience will always create unnatural circumstances that will keep us captive to imaginary needs.” Stephanie Bacquet Mathews. I believe this is how we got here.
Debt as enslavement. Most Americans do not own their homes. They hold mortgages. Most Americans do not own their cars. They hold loans. Consumer debt in the United States has climbed past $17 trillion when you include mortgages; household and personal debt together represent a system that requires every participating body to keep working, keep producing, keep consuming, just to stay in place.
The credit score is perhaps the most elegant piece of this architecture. Your creditworthiness, your supposed measure of financial health, is built on debt. If you pay with cash, save rather than borrow, and carry no debt, you have a poor credit score. The system literally punishes you for not being indebted. It treats solvency as a liability. The only way to be considered financially trustworthy is to prove that you are good at managing debt, which means proving you are good at remaining in the system that keeps you working.
This is not accidental design.
Debt is the leash. It is elegant because it is invisible. A person with a car payment, a mortgage, a credit card minimum, and a student loan does not feel enslaved; they feel like a participant, a responsible adult, someone who has earned access to convenience. But the practical reality is that they cannot stop working. They cannot say no to a bad employer. They cannot take a season to grow food, to care for someone they love, to simply stop. The debt requires their continuous labor.
And now the system that created that debt for individuals is replicating it at the national level, while simultaneously making clear that it no longer needs the labor of those individuals the way it once did.
This is the question that keeps me up: If AI and automation replace most human labor within a decade, as the projections suggest, and the billionaire class no longer needs human workers to generate wealth, and the fiat money system is collapsing under debt that cannot be serviced, what exactly is the plan for the rest of us?
I think this is the right question. And I think the honest answer is that there is no plan for the rest of us.
Stocks, when denominated in dollars that are losing value, become abstract. Billionaire wealth, when stored in a currency that is collapsing, becomes abstract. The question “is their money still real if the dollar is no longer valuable?” is not a conspiracy theory. It is the correct economic question. And the answer is: not necessarily. Not in the way it is now.
What retains value when the fiat system buckles is not complicated. It is ancient. It is food. Water. Land. The skills to produce and preserve both. The relationships with neighbors that allow genuine exchange rather than market exchange. The knowledge of what grows here, in this soil, in this season. The capacity to birth, to heal, to build, to preserve without a supply chain.
People often think of toilet paper and bullets. You can survive a short crisis with those. You cannot survive what comes after an empire’s insolvency with them. What has always carried people through the collapse of economic systems is community, land knowledge, and the willingness to share labor.
The body has always known what has real value. The Sacred Embodied Human Animal does not need to be told by an economist that food matters more than fiat currency. It knows this. It knows it in hunger. It knows it in the satisfaction of eating something it grew. It knows it in the way a child reaches for real food before processed food if given both without marketing pressure.
The disconnection from this knowledge is not natural. It was engineered. It took generations of convenience, of packaging, of debt-financed access to things that simulate abundance without creating it, to get a population to the place where most people cannot grow food, cannot preserve a harvest, cannot identify a medicinal plant, cannot go three days without a supply chain. That is not human nature. That is the result of a system that needed people to be dependent in order to be profitable.
I am not 100% sustainable. I do not pretend to be, and I do not think that is the goal. I buy feed for my animals in winter. I rely on things I cannot produce alone. This is correct. We are not meant to be solitary, self-contained units of survival. We are meant to live in community, to specialize in what we love and do well, to offer that to the people around us and receive what they offer in return. That is what real economy means. Not extraction. Not debt. Not infinite growth. Reciprocity. Gift. Specialization in service of the whole.
Individualism is dying because it was never actually alive. It was a marketing strategy dressed as a value. The Sacred Embodied Human Animal is a communal creature. It does not thrive in isolation. It thrives in web, in relationship, in the kind of interdependence that a suburban cul-de-sac or a social media following cannot replicate, but that a real community of people who know each other’s land and skills and rhythms absolutely can.
The collapse is not the END! I want to say this directly, because I think fear is the primary response most people have to the word collapse, and fear is not useful.
The fiat money system collapsing is not the end of human life. It is the end of a particular arrangement of human life, one that has been running for about a century in its current form and that has been building toward this mathematical impossibility for decades. Empires borrow until they cannot. Currencies inflate until they cannot. Systems that require infinite growth on a finite planet eventually encounter the planet.
What comes after is not nothing. What comes after is always determined by what people were doing before the collapse; whether they were building dependence or building capacity, accumulating convenience or accumulating knowledge, storing money or storing seeds.
But I am growing food, breeding animals, continuing to learn which plants on this land hold medicine. My children know these things too. This is what humans did for 300,000 years before someone decided that depending on a supply chain and a credit score was the better arrangement.
The billionaires are making a category error. They think they can take the money and leave the earth. They think the data center is the future and the soil is the past. They think the body is a limitation to be transcended rather than the only intelligence that has ever actually sustained life on this planet. Transhumanism, is not something I enjoy looking more into. But it is what these tech billionaires believe. They don’t need humans, or clean air, or an Earth, if their bodies are not needed anymore.
But my body is needed. I love my body. I love my embodiment. I have stepped away from the death cult of Thanatos. (And yes, Jesus is a representative of Thanatos, and a death cult. But more on that another day.) I also have a matrifocal vision of sex and pleasure, rather than the cult of Eros’ perversion of sex and the need to power, master, control or contort others to get off. (Again more on that another day.)
The Sacred Embodied Human Animal knows better. It has always known better. And every time an empire has burned itself to the ground on its own debt and its own arrogance, the people who survived were the ones who still knew how to put their hands in the soil.
We are those people. We are building that knowledge now, while we still have time to build it with some stability around us. That is not small. That is not retreat. That is the most important work being done anywhere right now.
Stay rooted.
Stephanie Bacquet Mathews
Magical Mothering | stephaniebacquetmathews.com