Global Debt
The website Visual Capitalist has a chart that shows how much of the world’s debt is owned by individual countries. The image is a giant circle. What immediately strikes one when looking at it is that half of the worlds debt is held by only two nations, the United States (31.8%) and Japan (18.8%). Some nations on the list are surprising. Is it really possible that Italy’s debt (3.9%) is roughly twice that of Spain’s?
The debts are color-coded, so that the nations with the highest debt to GDP ratios are in yellow. With this approach Japan is the clear standout, a giant block of yellow on a mostly mauve chart, with the lone exception of Greece. According to this chart, Japan’s debt to GDP ratio is currently 239.3%, the highest of any major nation. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Russia is only responsible for .3% of the world’s debt, which places it in a similar category as oil powers such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Nigeria. One often hears that Russia is suffering because of low oil prices. It’s also important to have the context that Russia has the lowest debt of any major power. Of course, with $20 trillion dollars in debt, the U.S. is by far the largest global debtor. …