I am not sure I understand how you obtained your values. It seems that the kind of debt you are discussing is external debt, which is not the same as government debt. According to Wikipedia, external debt is "that part of the total debt in a country that is owed to creditors outside the country. The debtors can be the government, corporations or private households." In particular, external debt includes more than just money owed by the government, and it does not include money owed to creditors within the country. If you really want to discuss external debt, you also need to take into consideration external assets. A high external debt is not necessarily a huge problem as long as the external assets exceed the debt (i.e., the "net international investment position" is positive). This is the case for many of the countries at the top of your list, e.g., Switzerland, Luxembourg, Norway, Belgium, and Netherlands. (Belgium might still be in some trouble, but for other reasons.) Link with more countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_international_investment_position The two kinds of debt are typically not closely related. For the U.S., they do happen to be approximately the same (if by government debt we mean the total amount owed by the government on all levels in the country as measured by the IMF), but this is a mere coincidence. Japan's government debt is five times its external debt. France's government debt, something like $1.8 trillion, is significantly less than its external debt, which amounts to $5 trillion. Luxembourg is an extreme case, its external debt being 170 times its public debt and its external assets being even greater. This is because the country is one of the major European centers of banking. Around 150 international banks (including banks from China, Japan and the U.S.) have branches in Luxembourg. One of those banks going bankrupt would certainly have an impact on Luxembourg's economy, but the effect would be substantially less devastating than for the country of origin of the given bank, as in the case of Iceland. (I guess Luxembourg''s greatest worry would be deposit guarantee payments, but apparently they only amount to €20000 per customer and bank.) Given the splendid net international investment position of Luxembourg, I don't think it is fair to say that the country is in trouble. At least, the country is very unlikely to be among the first to fall. Jakob Jonsson ________________________________________ Från: math-fun-bounces@mailman.xmission.com [math-fun-bounces@mailman.xmission.com] för Simon Plouffe [simon.plouffe@gmail.com] Skickat: den 17 juli 2011 00:28 Till: math-fun@mailman.xmission.com Ämne: Re: [math-fun] the volume of the debt, us and france, or the volume of a pile of euros or american quarter. Hello, I my own computations, I took the CIA world fact book and computed the ratio of the debt to most of the countries, in my opinion these countries are technically bankrupt, the worst being Luxembourg, they owe 4 million dollars per person. I took the first 197 countries were the data was available, the countries that are in a bankrupt situation are in order Country ratio of debt and revenue per person Luxembourg 50.94 Monaco 18.20 Ireland 13.27 Netherlands 5.65 United Kingdom 4.27 Switzerland 4.25 Belgium 3.53 Denmark 3.07 Austria 2.51 France 2.39 Liberia 2.32 Portugal 2.18 Hong Kong 2.17 Norway 2.05 Finland 2.04 Sweden 2.02 Germany 1.86 Spain 1.77 Greece 1.66 Italy 1.34 Cook Islands 1.31 Latvia 1.18 Australia 1.08 Slovenia 0.99 United States 1.02 Canada is at the 34'th rank with a ratio of 0.79 So since, the debt of Luxembourg represent 51 times the annual revenue of a person then I am afraid they are doomed. The total being something like 62000 billion dollars, the interest of this is about 3000 billions dollars per year (at 5%). The curve of US debt (as well as most of the others) is steadily increasing, if we extrapolate the curve for let's say 250 years : First scenario, the international banking system will collapse and 3 countries might get pass this point , China, India and Russia, mostly because the amount of money the owe is ridiculous. Simon Plouffe _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun