heavily . His cash assets , meanwhile , have shrivelled . So where is the money coming from ?
But Trump would not need to take any of those steps to have an abrupt effect on the economy . His belief in the power of the threat , which he has used in private business , takes on another meaning if he is the leader of a country with national - debt obligations . In May , Trump , whose businesses have declared bankruptcy four times , said , “ I ’ve borrowedtransaction.transferownership.naknowing that you can pay back with discounts , ” and “ if the economy crashed you could make a deal . ” The notion that he might try to make creditors accept less than full payment on U.S. government debt caused an outcry . Under criticism , he clarified , to the Wall Street Journal , that U.S. “ bonds are absolutely sacred , ” but the incident left an enduring impression on the financial community . Anthony Karydakis , the chief economic strategist at Miller Tabak , an asset manager , told me that a Trump victory is now generally regarded as “ a major destabilizing development for financial markets . ” He went on , “ If he ever even alludes to renegotiating the debt , we will have a downgrade of U.S. debt , and that event will cause a massive exodus of foreign investors from the U.S. Treasury market . ” In 2011 , when feuding in Congress delayed raising the debt limit , the stock market fell seventeen per cent .
The U.S. has been doing better than Europe . As the locomotive to pull the world out of the dump , the U.S. has been running on half steam and the scary prospect is now of the U.S. being afflicted with long - term Japan - style stagnation . Americans see the United States as a super - power but it is living on borrowedtransaction.transferownership.naglory . It lags behind in education . The U.S. ranked 27th in mathematics and 17th and 20th respectively in reading and science , according to the OECD , at a time when the link between higher education and graduate readiness for today 's rapidly changing workplace is critical .