US, CDN, Aussie, German DEBT break down | and UK omg!

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Debt to GDP ratios including China's status.

Some stand out details:

Aussie and CDN household debt levels likely secondary to the housing bubbles in both nations.
Don't let the CDN bank debt fool you as their leverage is at pre-Lehman levels.
The rate(and amount) at which China has accumulated debt is quite dramatic.

oh and FTR I'm quite sure this is only Federal level debt...state/municipal debt is not included.

as for UK way back on Q2 2011 there numbers were 98, 109, 219, 81 = 507%

Any thoughts?

I know virtually no one cares, but there might be a few of you who do.

I think the only thing that makes me a tiny bit relieved is to see China at the top. It shows that BRICS is just as vulnerable as anyone else.

they are in the worst shape of the BRICS

their economy will crash at some point

China has built 66 000 000 apartments that have never been lived in...entire cities empty...ghost cities

USA has well over 28 trillion in debt

I know only a little about the economics, but can defintely tell you the Chinese people are very worried about the stocks and shares market and economy right now. That market dropped drastically a few years ago and now again. China has been seen as a sound investment by the west, but no longer. A lot of money came from Hong Kong.

China has had tremendous problems to overcome and I don't think any political or private system would readily overcome them. The present leadership has been trying to fight corruption which has historically been a way of being doing business. Now people are afraid to make decisions and don't know how to do business honestly. We in the west found change frpm serfdom painful and driven by plague, but China has more problems to face.

Just how much this will affect the west, and it must, is to be seen.

Thanks for posting stats for Debt-to-GDP. I find ratios to be a helpful way to look at many such things.

If their rulers fail to stop the current sell pressures, it could create a global contagion.

Yesterday, their gov't injection 100 Billion USD in TWO HOURS to prop up the market. Today it dropped another 2.8ish%. They have intervened over 40 times in the last ~1 month to stave off a precipitous fall.

If they fail completely, there will be huge problems like 2008.

Your quite welcome.

We're the lowest on the list! W00T! But we're also the second highest for household debt.

The household debt of Canadians is chiefly secondary to its ongoing Housing Bubble which unlike USA, Spain, etc... did not burst....YET.

Australia is in this same condition. Soon both will burst but the debt will remain.

Saudi Arabia has by contrast a gov't debt to GDP ratio of 1.6% , for some perspective.

House prices in UK never really fell much at all this time (2007 onwards) unlike before.
http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/8733/ ... ices-high/

However they will be building more of them, and it is set to dip.

The way I understand it (and I'm no expert), account deficit far more cause for concern than national debt.

Thanks for posting, this is very fascinating! I didn't realize the US was so low on household debt. The way it looks living it, it feels like it's the American way to drown in debt! Apparently not so. Just our government drowning in debt more than everyone else ^.^ although that may have to do with the low amount of debt the financial institutions have because of the bailouts...

The ratio that most economists and politicians get most concerned about is Government Debt to GDP, which currently stands at about 80% in the UK. This compares quite favourably to the 200%+ ratio that was built up during the Napoleonic wars, and during World Wars 1 and 2.

On the other hand, we haven't been in a wartime environment for over 70 years, our Government debt is still increasing by around £90,000,000,000 (£90 billion) per year, and none of the political parties have any real policy for dealing with this. George Osborne's attitude seems to be 'At least we're not Greece'.

The 'Current Account Deficit' (aka Trade Deficit) used to be quite an issue before the era of floating currencies was established in 1971. It gave rise to a major crisis in 1967, which resulted in a large devaluation of the Pound, and it was again an issue in the summer of 1970, to such an extent that some believe it caused Harold Wilson's Labour government to lose the General Election in June of that year. Most economists believe that this is nowadays a 'self-correcting' phenomenon. We'll see....

Your welcome.

One of the challenges for all nations is the level of economic connectedness our modern economy has created. The world's largest banks all own shares in the other global banks as just one example. If, for example, China were to experience a severe crisis it would affect the entire G20 and all of the global banks. No one nation is economically safe because any crisis creates systemic consequences.

See that is what I thought, but apparently they were worried about it last year.

Even though I'm a trade liberal, I'm skeptical about "self righting".