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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

Some interesting data points in there... Japan, government dept is 200% GDP? Never knew that...

Belgium 100.7%? France 94.1%? That's not much better than Ireland (102.4%) and Portugal (103.1%)!

Obviously some countries are much better at managing their debts than others (or at least their public image). Can we learn anything?

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Japan has had high debt for a couple of decades, and is an interesting example. From what I understand the debt has really hampered growth. However, the debt is mostly held by the Japanese (I think), which is a much different situation because the money is just circulating from the general population to those in the population holding the debt, rather than being sent overseas to foreign creditors.

Japan is about to hit the wall though. They've lived off of a culture of savings, and those savers are all retiring, so Japan is going to see a reduced ability to finance its debt domestically. (This is also already beginning to impact the U.S. ability to borrow from Japan). Japan's house of cards is going to collapse in the next decade, and Japan's long slide of mismanagement into the second tier of the global economy will be complete. In just a generation they will have fallen from first place to trailing Korea.

I've heard a suggestion to change PIGS to BIGPIGS (Belgium, Ireland, Great-Britain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain). Until we get some extra vowels, we can let France off the hook.

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