July 21, 2011: Public debt and the elephant in the room

[ZenGum]

Here is a graph that appeared in the media recently. I'll show two versions.

The horizontal axis shows total government debt.
The vertical axis shows last year's budget defecit, i.e. how fast debt is growing.
These are all done as a percentage of GDP so it fairly accurately represents each nation's ability to deal with this debt.

The bottom left corner is good - low debt, small defecit. The top right is bad.

Here is the trimmed version, without the elephant.



So there's the US - high deficit, serious total debt; the European debt - notice Greece with its very large total debt and serious defecit. There is China looking pretty good (although even here, there are questions) and Australia, so far kept healthy by China's demand for minerals.

Here's the elephant:



Japan is still the world's 3rd largest economy, has the most aged population, a shrinking labour-force, and minimal natural resources. Yet, no-one is even talking about this!

You work it out. Me no like.