"If danhoff's question is too hard, then i've got another one. How will the US even stop borrowing, and when?"
Great question! And it helps explain why many Western investors have given up on gold this year. Note when Goldman released their report... April 10th, a couple of days before gold crashed below $1500.
"A budget deficit that was more than 10 percent of GDP in 2009 is on track to be about half that this year.
"The federal budget deficit is shrinking rapidly," writes Jan Hatzius, the chief economist of Goldman Sachs, in an April 10 report. Goldman estimates that in the first three months of 2013 the deficit was running at 4.5 percent of GDP, and they forecast a deficit of 3 percent of GDP or less in the 2015 fiscal year.
Hatzius adds that “there is still a great deal of room for the economic recovery to reduce the deficit for cyclical reasons.”
