U.S. Has $45 Trillion In Natural Resources Alone, More Than Entire National Debt

Lance Roberts of RIA Advisors recently challenged the doomer narrative that America’s debt load guarantees an imminent financial collapse. On Adam Taggart’s Thoughtful Money podcast, Roberts argues that investors often look at the U.S. national debt in isolation without considering the country’s underlying asset base. The United States may have roughly $40 trillion in debt, but it also controls an enormous amount of valuable assets, including natural resources, public land, infrastructure, military assets, and one of the world’s largest recurring tax revenue streams.

The Balance Sheet Argument

Roberts started with a chart of natural resource value by country. “This is a chart of just natural resource value by country, right? Russia, $75 trillion. The US, $45 trillion,” he said, describing deposits of coal, timber, natural gas, and gold. His punchline: “So just in natural resources, we have more natural resource value… than the debt that we have now.” That number lands harder with WTI crude at $109.76 per barrel, which sits in the 98th percentile of its 12-month range, lifting the implied value of domestic reserves.

Roberts layered in other assets that the U.S. government has on the balance sheet. “Now we can talk about the military. We can talk about public, public lands, public real estate, government buildings, so forth and so on,” he said, adding that “the government has nearly $5 trillion a year just in revenue.” The idea is that if you were looking at a household’s financial picture, you’d take liabilities into account alongside assets.

The Timing Debate

Adam Taggart pushed back on the idea that America’s natural resource asset value can act as a fix to the growing debt. “If you look at the growth in debt compared to the growth in GDP since the ’70s, the debt has been growing way faster than GDP. At some point that will really matter,” Taggart argued.

However, Roberts pointed to Japan’s decades of ultra-high debt-to-GDP levels that were sustained without a systemic collapse. Most investors already understand that the U.S.’s debt trajectory looks unsustainable over a long enough timeframe. The harder question is timing. Japan has shown that sovereign debt burdens can persist far longer than many macro investors expect, especially for countries that control their own currency and maintain deep domestic capital markets.

With the Fed funds rate now at 3.75%, down 75 basis points from a year ago, debt service pressure has eased somewhat relative to peak-tightening levels. Lower rates reduce refinancing stress and help delay the point where the interest expense on debt becomes economically destabilizing.