Bonddad has another excellent diary up today,
"The Unbelievable Level of US Debt." As usual, he makes plenty of excellent points about the troubling macroeconomic state of the US and how the Republican party has brought up to this perilous situation.
It made me wonder, though - relative to other countries, how bad is the US debt situation? While I do have some background in finance, it's not really my forte, so I did only a very simple bit of analysis. I didn't go out and get the figures out what the ratio of debt to GDP is for every country in the world, though those graphs are often telling - the US is slipping towards a debt profile more closely akin to a developing nation than a developing one.
No, I did something a lot simpler than that. I went to the CIA World Factbook. And there it was, under facts for the 'World' region:
estimated 2004 world debt is $12.7 trillion. In other words, the US national debt alone makes up about three quarters of all the external debt in the
world.
That's slightly hyperbolic, because it's specifically external debt - owed to entities outside the country of origin. So the US national debt ought to be lower, right, since part of it is held within the US? Well, the same document gives the
US external debt a value of $8.837 trillion in 2004, so no, it's not hyperbole at all. The last three Republican presidents are responsible for about $6 trillion of that - or literally half of all the public debt in the world.
How's
that for the party of fiscal responsibility?
Definition of External Debt:
This entry gives the total public and private debt owed to nonresidents repayable in foreign currency, goods, or services. These figures are calculated on an exchange rate basis, i.e., not in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms.