Good grief. Very sobering. Not surprising that the USA owes the most to creditors in other countries, about $13.4 trillion (if I’m reading the numbers correctly). Over $43K per person, nearly a whole year’s GNP.
But there are lots of countries in much worse shape, and some of them are surprising. Most startling to me was the level of indebtedness that tiny little Luxembourg has been allowed to accumulate, a stunning $2 trillion or so, saddling each and every resident of the teeny state with an unbearable debt burden of nearly $4 million! Somehow, Luxembourg owes about 50 times its entire GNP. Yikes! Makes Greece look like a thrifty penny pincher.
Or how about little Iceland? It’s only 34th on the list in terms of national debt (about $120 billion), but the island has so few people that it works out to about $363K per person, with the total debt nearly 10 times the GNP. Appalling.
By way of comparison, China comes in at #22 on list, with an external debt of about $360 billion, yet with their giant population, that’s only $271 per capita. Just pocket change for westerners. Still, even though their economy is growing so fast, that $360 billion is 5% of the Chinese GNP.
OTOH, the Dutch are in real trouble. At #5 on the list, they owe a whopping $3.7 trillion or so, over $223K per person. And the total debt is a staggering 467% of their GNP. Whereas Greece, which has gotten so much bad press lately, owes merely a relatively trifling 153% of its low GNP.
So thanks, Kendall. Yes, there’s a lot of interesting data here, but it’s really rather depressing. Most of the western countries are doing badly. And the harsh truth of Prov. 22:7 will someday bear its bitter fruit, [i]”The borrower is slave to the lender.”[/i]
Interesting that, on a per capita basis, we are smack in the middle of four of the five PIIGS (only Ireland is substantially higher). Unfortunately, attempting to rank by % of GDP seems to sort on the percentage as a character string, rather than as a real number, which is a thoroughly erroneous way to sort numeric values.
What is causing the problem appears to be the expression of the percentage as a decimal fraction rather than simply as an integer percentage (note that 66.53% of Croatia sorts out as a smaller percentage than the 7.10% of Belarus, to cite but one clear example). I don’t have the time or interest at this point to copy and paste into Excel to sort them correctly.
Good grief. Very sobering. Not surprising that the USA owes the most to creditors in other countries, about $13.4 trillion (if I’m reading the numbers correctly). Over $43K per person, nearly a whole year’s GNP.
But there are lots of countries in much worse shape, and some of them are surprising. Most startling to me was the level of indebtedness that tiny little Luxembourg has been allowed to accumulate, a stunning $2 trillion or so, saddling each and every resident of the teeny state with an unbearable debt burden of nearly $4 million! Somehow, Luxembourg owes about 50 times its entire GNP. Yikes! Makes Greece look like a thrifty penny pincher.
Or how about little Iceland? It’s only 34th on the list in terms of national debt (about $120 billion), but the island has so few people that it works out to about $363K per person, with the total debt nearly 10 times the GNP. Appalling.
By way of comparison, China comes in at #22 on list, with an external debt of about $360 billion, yet with their giant population, that’s only $271 per capita. Just pocket change for westerners. Still, even though their economy is growing so fast, that $360 billion is 5% of the Chinese GNP.
OTOH, the Dutch are in real trouble. At #5 on the list, they owe a whopping $3.7 trillion or so, over $223K per person. And the total debt is a staggering 467% of their GNP. Whereas Greece, which has gotten so much bad press lately, owes merely a relatively trifling 153% of its low GNP.
So thanks, Kendall. Yes, there’s a lot of interesting data here, but it’s really rather depressing. Most of the western countries are doing badly. And the harsh truth of Prov. 22:7 will someday bear its bitter fruit, [i]”The borrower is slave to the lender.”[/i]
This has the makings of a GLOBAL catastrophe.
David Handy+
We are stuffed!
Interesting that, on a per capita basis, we are smack in the middle of four of the five PIIGS (only Ireland is substantially higher). Unfortunately, attempting to rank by % of GDP seems to sort on the percentage as a character string, rather than as a real number, which is a thoroughly erroneous way to sort numeric values.
What is causing the problem appears to be the expression of the percentage as a decimal fraction rather than simply as an integer percentage (note that 66.53% of Croatia sorts out as a smaller percentage than the 7.10% of Belarus, to cite but one clear example). I don’t have the time or interest at this point to copy and paste into Excel to sort them correctly.
Pax et bonum,
Keith Töpfer
As my contribution to the Millennium Development Goals, I am offering to pay off the external debts of Brunei, Macau AND Niue!
(Please, no pulbicity!)