

Interactive map of World Debt - cwan
http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2010/06/indebtedness_after_financial_crisis?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/bl/debt

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_delirium
Due to adding together the various categories of debt, this is fairly tricky
to interpret. Countries with large private-sector corporations and advanced
financial sectors (like the U.S. and Western Europe) generally have more
corporate debt, because leveraging up is almost ubiquitous--- even
conservative companies often use leverage, they just don't do it to as high a
multiple. Meanwhile, in countries with a lot of mom-and-pop businesses and
small or heavily regulated finance sectors, business debt is quite low. The
bottom three on the financial-sector debt, for example, are Russia, India, and
China, three countries in which the financial sector is heavily state-
controlled.

Not that that necessarily makes the debt good or ok, but to a large extent it
seems it just correlates with "has a non-government-controlled financial
sector".

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lowkey
Wow, check out Household debt. I'm not surprised to see Brittain, the United
States and Canada top the list, but can anyone tell me what is going on with
Switzerland?

I always thought the Swiss to be a wealthy, financially conservative lot.

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jsnell
My guess: expensive real estate, distorted tax rules that make it advantageous
to hold a mortgage [1], and availability of very long term mortgages (up to
100 years). So people take a mortgage and never pay it off, even if they could
afford to. Net household savings / debt statistics might tell a different
story.

[1] Though IIUC the mortgage deduction and its counterpart of taxing the
"income" of living in your own house rather than renting are going to be
phased out. So this reason would not apply for much longer.

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eru
Actually taxing the income of living in your own house as similar to rent
sounds reasonable to me. Making debt payments tax deductible is a bigger
problem.

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known
Investing cash will create new jobs, spending will preserve existing jobs and
saving cash will destroy jobs & the economy.

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chrismealy
Somebody's savings is somebody else's debt. The whole world can't be a net
saver, as nice as that would sound.

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nandemo
Sure the whole world can be a net saver. In fact it is, which is one of the
reasons the whole world is getting wealthier.

The counterpart of debt is credit, not savings. Having savings is necessary to
be a creditor, but it doesn't imply being a creditor.

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tpz
Unless I am missing something, the only way the whole world can be a net saver
would be for for all of us to start exporting goods and services off-planet.
Anything else is simply a mirage that obscures currency inflation. :) Which,
on a related note, goes eleventy-fold for anything remotely related to
derivative instruments.

~~~
qwzybug
Bucky Fuller would disagree. Money stands for something—the real wealth of
technology and information. As we continue to create and improve quality of
life the real amount of capital in the world increases.

I always liked to imagine that, ideally, an inflating currency would proxy for
this real wealth-generation, but that doesn't quite seem to be the case.

Anyway, the important thing is that we're not (simply) printing money. The
world gets richer.

