The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has sounded the alarm over the swelling U.S. debt, estimating that at its current growth rate, it will surpass the levels of Europe’s most indebted countries, Italy and Greece, for the first time this century.

Specifically, the IMF projects that U.S. public debt will surge by more than twenty percentage points by the end of the decade, reaching 143.5% of GDP. This represents essentially the steepest increase in debt ratio among advanced economies.

At these levels, it will also surpass its previous record, which had been set during the pandemic.