{"id":237265,"date":"2010-01-27T14:21:47","date_gmt":"2010-01-27T19:21:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reuters.com\/james-pethokoukis\/?p=3275"},"modified":"2010-01-27T14:21:47","modified_gmt":"2010-01-27T19:21:47","slug":"just-how-bad-is-the-us-debt-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/237265","title":{"rendered":"Just how bad is the US debt problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some interesting factoids over at <a href=\"http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/CapitalGainsAndGames\/~3\/FqP9EoqcknU\/fiscal-democracy-contd\">Capital Gains and Games<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Point One:\u00a0\u00a0We often hear that the US government debt load is\u00a0 lower as a share of GDP than those of many other large, wealthy nations, including Japan, Germany, the UK\u00a0and France. But a more apples-to-apples comparison, which combines federal, state and local government borrowing, suggests that the US is in worse shape than most other AAA-rated countries.<\/p>\n<p>By that measure, the United States general government totalled 78.6 percent of GDP in 2009 and\u00a0 will hit 90 percent by the end of 2010, Fitch says.\u00a0 That would make us the the most highly leveraged of all AAA-rated countries &#8212; Germany, France, the UK,\u00a0 as higher than that of almost all other AAA-rated nations.\u00a0 (Japan&#8217;s debt is still much\u00a0 higher, but it lost AAA status back in the late 90&#8217;s.)<\/p>\n<p>Point Two: the\u00a0 picture is even grimmer if you look at US government borrowing as a share of revenues.\u00a0\u00a0 US goverment debt (federal, state and local)\u00a0was 330 percent of revenues in 2009 &#8212; the\u00a0 highest ratio of any AAA country.\u00a0\u00a0 And that 330 percent doesn&#8217;t include additional trillions of dollars in new &#8220;contingent liabilities&#8221; &#8212; bank guarantees, federally insured mortgage-backed securities, and so on.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some interesting factoids over at Capital Gains and Games: Point One:\u00a0\u00a0We often hear that the US government debt load is\u00a0 lower as a share of GDP than those of many other large, wealthy nations, including Japan, Germany, the UK\u00a0and France. But a more apples-to-apples comparison, which combines federal, state and local government borrowing, suggests that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1063,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1063"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}