Top economist says $39 trillion national debt leaves government worse prepared for recession than ever

The U.S. has run into recessions with a messy fiscal situation before, but never this bad.

That’s the warning from Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok, who wrote in his Daily Spark newsletter on Tuesday the country is approaching a potential downturn “with this little fiscal buffer” for the first time in modern history.

Gross national debt is currently festering at $39 trillion and growing at what the Peter G. Peterson Foundation calls a “staggering” pace of accumulation. Debt held by the public has already overtaken annual GDP—just the interest alone that we pay on our debt runs at $3 billion a day, exceeding annual federal spending on Medicare or Medicaid.

That big, ugly, black hole of our debt is slowly sucking out the ability of the central bank to respond to recessions, Slok argues.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/05/14/national-debt-gdp-recession-39-trillion-torsten-slok/?utm_source=reddit/