Why Does the American Economy Resemble the Bathroom at the Armenian-American Library in Watertown, Massachusetts?
America’s safe-haven status rests uneasily atop soaring debt, persistent inflation, and a political system unwilling to confront its addiction to spending.
At some point in David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus Infinite Jest, a relatively obscure member of the dramatis personae named Tony locks himself in a bathroom stall at the Armenian-American Library in Watertown, Massachusetts. His belief is that the stall is a safe haven away from the streets that feed his longtime harmful addiction to drugs and alcohol. As the lights shut off for the weekend, his body begins convulsing, his bowels churn, and he laments the agonizing pain accompanying violent sudden withdrawals. The safe haven Tony sought in the bathroom stall treats him with malice and indifference, forcing him back out onto the streets, only later to suffer a seizure on a crowded subway train. Following an intervention by good samaritans and brief stay in a hospital, Tony finds himself in a halfway house. He never truly recovers.
Post World War II order enshrined the United States as the world’s safe haven. Rule of Law, pluralism, and unrivaled economic dynamism catapulted Americans to a level of wealth and prestige never achieved by human beings. Business owners, CEOs, and laborers had all enough money to comfortably buy homes, cars, and send their kids to colleges. As the New York Post proclaimed, Only God is Above Us. The consequences of this meteoric stature have been nowhere more visible than in treasury markets, where the world bestowed upon America Safe Haven Status, establishing American debt as the “risk free asset”. Tired, poor, or drunk, American debt paid you back, with (sometimes generous) interest.
The safe haven that the world knew has changed, now more closely resembling the middle school bathroom stall walls of Tony’s Armenian-American Library in Watertown, and there is certainly no God above us. Malice and indifference are the core tenets that have underwritten American posture toward the world over the course of the past two decades. While at moments it has provided opportunities for gut-busting laughs that seem almost scripted - and perhaps they indeed are, joy is elusive, with time mostly defined by a bizarre cruelty, deference to zealotry, and algorithmic hysteria.
America’s budget is a direct casualty, and has become something resembling a marriage of Elagabalus and Caligula, underscored by both the personal extravagance and the profligate burning of state finances. $1.5 trillion dollar budget for weapons and missiles, some of which will be aimed accidently at kindergartens, $500 billion for high school graduates who have an unfulfilled fetish to cosplay the Gestapo, and $400 million for a ballroom where guests will certainly have whoopie-cushions placed on their seats before they sit down to eat. The consequences that the deterioration of the safe haven will have on American capital markets, assets, and wealth could not be more acute.
While I was writing this piece, American debt owed to its creditors crossed $40 trillion dollars, and the 30 year treasury note creeped over 5.5%. In the month of July 2026 alone, American public debt grew by $400 billion dollars. For over 6 years, the rate of inflation has been over the Federal Reserve Bank’s target of 2%. 30 year mortgages are fast approaching 7%, and have consistently been above 5% since 2021. These Blair Witch figures are haunting the American public while spending on data centers and AI reaches levels that could instead provide healthcare for everyone. To the sound of a sad trombone, Q2 2026 GDP grew just 1.8%. A disastrous war with Iran has pushed up the price of Gasoline, causing the tactical sunglass wearing middle aged white man filling up their Ford Raptor in the same town they went to high school in to say, “fuck Donald Trump” on Fox News.
A rational actor might say: just stop the spending; however, most American leaders are delusional and complicit, and those that aren’t are dead but somehow still voting in congress (fig. Mitch McConnell, R-KY). The US is addicted to debt and doing no better than Tony before he walked into the library. Since the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, the American posture towards its economy has been just fucking print, with $30 trillion dollars, or 75% of the nominal total debt having been accrued since 2008, an eye watering increase of 296%. Alexander Hamilton is at the safe injection site handing out needles, and Monopoly Money has permeated all aspects of the American Economy. Elon Musk, world’s richest meth addict, survives on atop a pile of debt that he must keep selling to the public through increasingly Star Wars-like vehicles or he certainly will find a Khossogi-like fate. Meta, Google, and Amazon, have floated nearly a trillion in debt obligations, raised not just in Dollars, but Swiss Franc, Euro, and Yen. Spending like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs is heading toward Earth, American’s have accumulated $1.3 trillion dollars of credit card debt, roughly half the size of the entire GDP of the continent of Africa.
The American economy is suffering from a unique form of inebriation. It’s the kind of inebriation that would have forced any other economy to crash spectacularly in the style of Zimbabwe and Greece. Does this mean that we avoid the humiliation of being high at the Thanksgiving Day table with our family? What does getting sober look like? Might it look like the bathroom stall in the Armenian-American Library? Probably not, because that door won’t be open. Ironically, among the $30 trillion dollars of debt accrued since 2008, very little was earmarked to public libraries, who saw a collective 8% nominal decline in funding. It’s looking more and more likely that in this story, the addict collapses on the street, and never truly recovers.