The war Between the States in the 1860s was the first true explosion: federal debt rose from about $65 million in 1860 to roughly $2.7 billion after the war—an increase of over 4,000%.

(The percentage growth is so large because the debt was starting from such a low base, with President Andrew Jackson having completely eliminated it in 1835. Likewise, the percentage growth during later conflicts is smaller because they began from a much larger debt base.)

World War I produced another huge leap, taking debt from about $2.9 billion in 1914 to about $25 billion by 1920—up roughly 760%.

World War II was even larger in nominal terms, pushing debt from about $51 billion in 1940 to about $260 billion after the war—an increase of about 410%.

The Vietnam War saw US government debt rise from about $317 billion in 1965 to about $533 billion in 1975—up roughly 68%.

Using the best available estimates, the Afghanistan War added costs roughly equal to 59% of the federal debt outstanding when it began, while the 2003 Iraq War added costs roughly equal to 47%.

We are now well into the third month of the Iran war. US federal debt stood at roughly $38.7 trillion when the war began and has already climbed past $39.2 trillion. Where will it be when the war ends? Nobody knows, of course, but I think we can say with confidence that it will be meaningfully higher.

Indeed, war = Inflation, but there is an intermediate step in the process: debt.

War spending is financed largely through debt, which is then, in large part, bought by the central bank with currency it creates out of thin air.

A more accurate equation, therefore, is:

War = Debt = Inflation

That is how the Iran war is turbocharging the US government's debt spiral and accelerating its ever-increasing currency debasement, which was already nearing a crisis point even before taking into account the compounding effects of the war.

But that is not all.

Another likely casualty of the Iran war is the petrodollar system, which is essentially a protection racket for the large oil-producing countries in the Middle East aligned with the US, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Qatar.

The concept is simple. The US military "protects" these countries in exchange for their agreement to denominate oil sales in US dollars and recycle the proceeds into the US Treasury market, thereby supporting the dollar and helping keep interest rates lower than they otherwise would be.