(no subject)

[randomness]

The Economist's Buttonwood blog has posted a Global Debt Comparison visualization at http://buttonwood.economist.com/content/gdc. You can use the page to compare how deeply in debt various countries are.

The world total is $35 trillion and counting. Fortunately we just owe that money to other earthlings rather than, say, some other planet.

Comments

[dpolicar]

So, is there a short answer to who the hell the creditors are in this scenario?

I mean, in the real world, if I've borrowed $100, it follows that someone somewhere has lent $100. (Or 10 people have lent $10 each. Or something like that.) I don't expect there to be anything that straightforward going on in this case; I've come to expect that international finance operates on this weird quantum scale where normal intuitions about money simply don't apply.

Still... I'm not sure it would make any damn sense to talk about the world's global debt without talking about creditors.

[dirque.livejournal.com]

It's not a zero sum map. e.g. It only tracks debt, but individuals can lend money to gov't as well as pension funds, mutual funds, etc...

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

As dirque says, it's not a zero-sum map. Most of this debt has been sold to non-government entities. Pension funds, mutual funds, banks, even some ordinary people holding things like savings bonds.

That $35 trillion is owed by governments to individual earthlings, or collectively by subgroups of said earthlings.

And government debt is supposed to be some of the safest investments around...