The United States is sitting atop a fiscal precipice. With the total U.S. debt surpassing $37.43 trillion as of September 2025, the nation faces a historic reality. Nearly one-quarter of every tax dollar it collects is consumed by servicing the interest payments on its debt burden.
Recent years have seen the U.S. government rack up record-breaking tariff revenues, especially after a suite of new import duties imposed under the Trump administration.
These tariffs are expected to bolster Treasury coffers and could reduce the national deficit by $4 trillion over a decade.
“Despite tariff revenues, the deficit for July was $291B with the U.S. spending $630B and collecting $338B meaning 46¢ was borrowed for every $1 spent.”
Macro analyst Lyn Alden has popularized the “nothing stops this train” thesis, a phrase borrowed from pop culture but now synonymous with the U.S. debt dilemma.
“Just structurally, it’s [U.S. debt] growing above target almost without any way to stop it.”
According to the Peterson Foundation, interest payments are now the third-largest spending category for the federal government. They surpass nearly every other program except Social Security and Medicare.
As a share of revenues, federal interest payments will rise to 18.4 percent by year’s end, a level not seen since the early 1990s.
As interest payments consume ever-larger shares of federal revenue and traditional remedies like tariffs and spending cuts prove insufficient, the conversation around “hard money” intensifies.
As Alden’s thesis warns, nothing stops this train, and this realization is fueling renewed attention to hard money solutions like Bitcoin and gold.
As of mid-September 2025, gold had reached an all-time high, trading at over $3,600 per ounce, up more than 41% year-over-year.
Some analysts expect gold’s rally to continue, projecting prices toward $3,800 by the end of the year as global liquidity concerns drive investors into safe havens.
Bitcoin, dubbed by many as “digital gold,” is trading around $115,000–$118,000 after rebounding from its September lows near $108,000.
While Bitcoin’s price action has been volatile, many analysts, including Lyn Alden, expect to see it to hit at least $150,000 by the end of this cycle.
As fiscal pressures mount, these alternatives are increasingly seen as key safeguards in diversified portfolios, in a time when U.S. debt is spinning out of control.
