It's difficult for anybody to really fathom exactly what one trillion dollars represents, for in the everyday way of things, we have a good conception of a million dollars, but a trillion dollars is so far beyond that, it seems unfathomable, but it is very real and it definitely exists. First off, a billion dollars is a thousand million dollars, so a thousand millionaires would be worth in aggregate one billion dollars. This then means that one million millionaires would be worth in aggregate one trillion dollars. While there are plenty of millionaires, there are less than two thousand billionaires in the world, and the man with the current highest net worth in the world, is Bill Gates at about $86 billion dollars, which is less than 10% of a trillion dollars.
The white horse is the student loan debt which is estimated to be $1.31 trillion dollars, of which, this debt has increased from a fairly reasonable amount of just $90 billion dollars in 1999, to its current debt load of over a trillion dollars. All of this debt might be okay, if the United States, over the last generation had spent an inordinate amount of money to produce a country of geniuses, but that isn't true, whatsoever. The higher education con-game, has extracted billions upon billions of dollars primarily from financially unsophisticated young adults so that they have mortgaged their future to a debt load that in many cases is incredibly oppressive to their budget, with a lot of these students having either no degree, that is, they didn't even complete their collegiate courses, or a graduate degree that has been of little or no worth to them. While it seems fine, to pay the money now to get the education that will make life better, the price of education is exceeding too high for many, and basically is a virulent form of exploitation of the young.
The red horse is credit card debt, in which marketwatch.com states that we have: "$1.021 trillion in outstanding revolving credit in June 2017." Those banks and other banking type institutions that issue credit cards do not see such as some sort of beneficial favor to consumers, but as a way to make money off of consumers, in which, their preference, of which there is an abundant amount of people that fit this description, are people that are forever behind the proverbial eight ball, so that they must use credit cards in order to either make ends meet month by month, and/or are tempted to spend money that they don't readily have in order to get something that they would like to have, now. This allows those banks to charge a princely finance charge, along with other assorted penalties and fees for those that short-pay their monthly payments or are late, of which those financial fees along with financial interest charges, are a rich source of revenue for the banks, for the cost of money to the banks is negligible but the cost to consumers is stratospheric.
The black horse is automobile debts, according to qz.com, the "US closed out 2016 with just shy of $1.2 trillion in outstanding auto loan debt," of which these loans to consumers have never been longer in the length of time, that is to say, whereas five years was the maximum amount of time for an auto loan, thirty years ago, in today's auto loan world, according to time.com, "…less than 35% of us take out financing for five years or less," indicating that never has the length of time for auto loans been longer than it is at the present day, despite the fact that the interest cost for said loans have been at historic lows for the last decade or so. This indicates clearly, that for far too many people, they are lured into purchasing far too much car, by what appears to be low or reasonable monthly payments that go on forever, while starting further and further away from the real equity in their vehicle, because the amount that they owe exceeds the actual worth of the car upon purchase.
The pale horse, is mortgage debt, and this horse visited us not so long ago in the years 2007-2009, and despite changes made in the mortgage world, to verify employment, to sell to credit-worthy recipients, for higher down payments, and so on and so forth, the bottom line in the mortgage business, is that the more loans that are generated, the more potential profit and fees that are generated, in addition to the fact that mortgage originators often off-load their loans to the quasi-governmental guarantee organizations, known as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The amount of mortgage debt in America is currently over $14.5 trillion dollars, yet, it wasn't until 1977 that mortgage debt first crossed over $1 trillion dollars, and this current amount of debt is probably within months of exceeding the highest amount known on record which occurred in 2008.
These four horsemen, are all under the most extreme danger of any sort of normalization of interest rates, that is to say we have been living in an interest rate environment in which the borrower of such, especially those of excellent credit, have never paid lower interest rates, but the Federal Reserve has slowly begun to raise their rate of interest to a more traditional higher rate, and should this continue, each of these four horsemen, will find that being the borrowers of such, that they cannot and will not be able to stay current on their payments, leading not to a more severe version of recession that was suffered through just a scant ten years ago, but an outright depression or even a collapse of our monetary system as we currently know it.