The debt is high as balls of course, but really there is no specific significance to reaching the level of the GDP of one year. You could just as well say it has reached 400% of the quarterly GDP or 33% of the three year GDP.
Personally I’m more worried about concrete numbers like the cost of servicing the debt yearly. That has reached 17% of your yearly budget by now.
A metric a lot of things experts tend to rely on is the debt-to-GDP ratio. The idea being that you can have an insane debt, but if your economic output is also insane, you’ll be able to pay it off easier than a lesser economy. The US’ is currently at 120%-ish as of earlier this year. Notable examples to pull from seem to be Greece, and how they defaulted from their debt spiral after failing a repayment (ratio: 180%), and Japan, which I believe currently holds the largest Debt-to-GDP ratio (238%-ish).
Edit: interjecting my thoughts that nobody asked for, is that debt seems like a weird unknown in the economic media I see. Like, growing a significant debt is bad, but it oftentimes is used on infrastructure that you can’t just un-build, like what you can with a debt. When a country that did so defaults, I know there’s studies into it, but it almost seems terribly underreported on. So much so that I can’t say I’d know how things will unfold, especially with an economy of the US’ importance.
Edit: also yeah, I’m saying the included image/article/whatever in the post is wrong. We surpassed that in 2013.
Every American, babies to retire owe like $100.000 (napkin math, IIRC it’s even more) if you split up the debt.
I’d start thinking about that if I were an economist over there. Or a politician. Someone is going to have a huge, huuge, leverage over the usa til you fix that.
The debt is high as balls of course, but really there is no specific significance to reaching the level of the GDP of one year. You could just as well say it has reached 400% of the quarterly GDP or 33% of the three year GDP.
Personally I’m more worried about concrete numbers like the cost of servicing the debt yearly. That has reached 17% of your yearly budget by now.
A metric a lot of things experts tend to rely on is the debt-to-GDP ratio. The idea being that you can have an insane debt, but if your economic output is also insane, you’ll be able to pay it off easier than a lesser economy. The US’ is currently at 120%-ish as of earlier this year. Notable examples to pull from seem to be Greece, and how they defaulted from their debt spiral after failing a repayment (ratio: 180%), and Japan, which I believe currently holds the largest Debt-to-GDP ratio (238%-ish).
Edit: interjecting my thoughts that nobody asked for, is that debt seems like a weird unknown in the economic media I see. Like, growing a significant debt is bad, but it oftentimes is used on infrastructure that you can’t just un-build, like what you can with a debt. When a country that did so defaults, I know there’s studies into it, but it almost seems terribly underreported on. So much so that I can’t say I’d know how things will unfold, especially with an economy of the US’ importance.
Edit: also yeah, I’m saying the included image/article/whatever in the post is wrong. We surpassed that in 2013.
You can have insane debt. But if your economic output is also insane, you are insane.
Every American, babies to retire owe like $100.000 (napkin math, IIRC it’s even more) if you split up the debt.
I’d start thinking about that if I were an economist over there. Or a politician. Someone is going to have a huge, huuge, leverage over the usa til you fix that.