US debt crosses $40 trillion but everyone still trusts Uncle Sam. But for how long?

TOI correspondent from Washington: The United States’ national debt crossed $40 trillion on Tuesday, a number so large that even breaking it up with commas can scarcely make it comprehensible. As in a 4 followed by 13 zeroes: $40,000,000,000,000!Number-crunching economists reached for various metrics to convey the scale of the crisis. The US economy produces roughly $33 trillion worth of goods and services a year. So the debt is now bigger than the entire annual economic output (GDP) of the country. Per American, that works out to roughly $118,000; for a family of four, about $472,000. Divvying it another way, the US is adding debt at a rate of roughly $90,000 every second.To put that in perspective for readers in India, the $40 trillion debt America has racked up is roughly 10 times the size of India’s entire annual economy.