‘A fantastic amount of money to have borrowed’: a top Wall Street wealth advisor is stunned by the national debt

Greg Fleming has navigated Wall Street’s biggest crises over nearly four decades — from negotiating Merrill Lynch’s 2008 fire sale to building Rockefeller Capital Management into a $200 billion wealth empire.

But in a wide-ranging Bloomberg Wealth interview with David Rubenstein, it wasn’t markets, AI, or even inflation that left the Rockefeller Capital Management CEO sounding genuinely stunned.

“It’s a fantastic amount of money to have borrowed, even for an economy this robust and this big,” Fleming said, describing a national debt now approaching $40 trillion.

Fleming, who oversees more than $200 billion in client assets for some of America’s wealthiest families through the storied firm he built from John D. Rockefeller’s original 1882 family office didn’t mince words when Rubenstein pressed him on his biggest worry for the U.S. economy.

“I’m most focused on the fiscal situation in this country,” he said. “We’re still at relatively full employment … We have been in a good time. We run these 5, 6, 7% of GDP deficits annually, and there seems to be no impetus to change that.” He added a detail that has become a rallying point for fiscal hawks: the federal government now spends more on interest payments than on national defense.

Just how big is $40 trillion?

Fleming’s reaction isn’t hyperbole — it tracks with a running tally........

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