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Source: Economist
Category: Bailouts, Digital Media, Economy
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
Hard to tell the effect of the currency due to unlike nature of subgroups. Floaters are younger to markets (Poland 1992ish). Euro users are bimodal – old stable western europe and old destitute western europe.
Debt per citizen, Western gov’s
debt/citizen
Ireland 495,264
Switzerland 154,063
United Kingdom144,338
Norway 131,220
Belgium 113,603
Denmark 101,084
Sweden 91,487
Austria 90,128
France 74,619
Finland 68,960
Germany 57,755
Australia 52,596
Greece 47,636
United States 47,568
Netherlands 47,172
The countries often cited as the model for health benefits per citizen set the lowest standard for fiscal stewardship per citizen.
What’s the connection, Barry? I used Matlab to run a correlation of debt/citizen and taxes/GDP a couple of years ago – the correlation was over .9 on a scales of -1 to +1. (I removed 2 points way ABOVE the trend to make .9 show up. )
Why would high tax countries be the the ones with the worst debt? – the promise is always that if we raise taxes, debt will go down. Of the G20, I found Only Canada has higher taxes and lower debt than the US.
“Economic risk will be mostly contained to the subprime, uh, EuroZone economies.”
I have seen Episode 1 of this movie. I think EuroWide Recession could be Episode 2.
That is, stating that enormous economic and fiscal problems will be contained. Last time, it spread out pretty far, and there was no containment.
Where is the DeCoupling argument these days? I have seen it trotted out over occasion over the last 5 years. Barry, where are you on the “US can decouple” argument?
(I will email you a picture)
cjc
AtlasRocked wrote: “The countries often cited as the model for health benefits per citizen set the lowest standard for fiscal stewardship per citizen.”
Could be, but before you draw that conclusion you should get your numbers right first. No way has Greece a debt per capita that low, and Norway for that matter is more like zero. They got oil.
I wonder what Ireland’s debt per capita was before the previous government there gallantly guaranteed the private banks bad debts/bets on real estate. (Those pols should be drawn & quartered). Not only is the interest unsustainable beyond the short term, there are absolutely no prospects of EVER repaying the principal. The prior government pledged the population to perpetual debt servitude, they turned the entire country into a poor house, kind of took a page out of the playbook of their prior British overlords, once again the Irish don’t own their own country, now Eurobankers have replaced Cromwell as the Curse of Ireland.
Unemployment and emigration are up and real estate continues it descent from the bubble days, it’s bound to end badly in default and/or departure from Euro.
Ireland’s debt load is simply unsustainable:
500K/35K =14
Greece 48K/18K = 3
us $48K/$48K =1
UK 144K/28K = 6
GER 58K/32K = 2
FR 75K/30K 2.5
@EquitiesInHel : It was world bank data, and Greece can be in bigger trouble with less debt per capita, peril is a function of debt and the confidence the investors have you can pay it off. Greece is racked with tax evaders and runaway benefits. Japan has much higher gov’t debt per citizen, but their citizens own most of it.
Unconstrained democracies are a certain failure going back 2400 years to Plato observations, what we are seeing now is nothing new nor surprising. The less we restrain our Democracy with adherance to written law, the more we will fail as well.