Not all Debt is Equal

By Econ70 | 01/05/2012

While being in debt is not so great for a household–because interest payments leave the household and go to a bank, or credit card company, debt can be tolerable for a country. If the debt is largely internally held (Japan), interest payments go from the government to domestic creditor households. The problem is that to…

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Bad Debt

By Econ70 | 08/30/2011
A man in a suit and glasses is holding his hands up

Total debt is the sum of all IOUs ever issued by the Treasury and is (egad) 98% of GDP. Total debt is the sum of the public debt–which is held by individuals, foreign gov’ts and financial institutions–and is 61% of GDP, and the intra-governmental debt, which consists of gov’t IOUs held by the gov’t (the…

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