Economist Lyn Alden warns that U.S. fiscal deficits are an unstoppable force, driving demand for scarce assets like Bitcoin BTC/USD and gold.

What Happened: Speaking at Bitcoin conference 2025 last week, Alden popularized the phrase “nothing stops this train”—borrowed from the show Breaking Bad—to describe a fiscal trajectory that, in her view, is now governed by both mathematical inevitability and political intransigence.

"We're in a system where the brakes are gone," she said. "Raising interest rates only accelerates the federal deficit faster than it slows private borrowing."

Using historical data, Alden demonstrated how federal deficits used to rise during recessions and shrink during recoveries.

That relationship broke down after 2017. Since then, unemployment has remained low while deficits have ballooned, reaching 6–7% of GDP outside of crisis periods.

"This is not just cyclical," she argued. "It's structural."

A major factor is demographics.

As the Baby Boomer generation retires, Alden noted that Social Security's $3 trillion trust fund will be spent down, injecting more money into the economy while limiting political appetite for fiscal restraint.

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"It's the third rail of U.S. politics," she said. "No party will touch it."

The result: long-term, unavoidable deficits that persist regardless of the business cycle or who wins elections.

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Alden likened the system to a "shark that must keep swimming."

Citing data from 110 years of debt history, she showed that total debt levels almost never decline.

"The last time total U.S. debt dropped meaningfully was during the Great Depression and even in 2008, when it fell slightly, the Fed responded by ballooning the monetary base from $1 trillion to $6 trillion."

With U.S. debt now exceeding 100% of GDP and interest rates no longer structurally declining, Alden warned that interest expenses are consuming a rising share of federal outlays.

"We're in Wonderland," she said. "The tools that worked for decades now operate in reverse."

What’s Next: In contrast to fiat's "flexible ledger," Alden positioned Bitcoin as a fundamentally different system: one based on absolute scarcity, transparency, and a fixed supply.

"The fiat system always falls back on printing more units," she said. "Bitcoin doesn't allow that."

Her conclusion: The only rational hedge against this unsustainable trajectory is to hold "the highest quality scarce assets, "chief among them, Bitcoin.

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