Cool. Judging by all the debt clocks around, it would seem that financial armageddon disclosure has become trendy and fashionable. In Germany there is a company that actually builds made-to order debt clocks – it’s a burgeoning industry. Who knew?
So taking a little sampler, let’s see what we have. The U.S. debt clock (it’s a busy one) seems to be the grand-daddy of them all. Texas size. The U.S. national debt according to this one is at $11.932 trillion for a per-capita I.O.U. of $38,758 per U.S. citizen and $109,934 per tax-payer. Hey kids – surprise! With an annual GDP of $12.008 trillion, U.S. citizens can be happy to know that one year’s worth of hard work would pay off the debt (if they just bear down and don’t didn’t eat, house themselves or clothe themselves for that year).
Canadians are, let’s face it, just not as enterprising as Americans, and through their beer-drinking, hockey watching fog have only managed to accumulate a paltry CAD $497.3 billion, or CAD $14,803 per citizen/resident. After adjusting for the exchange rate, in real paper dollars that would be an even lower $13,915 per-capita, a shameful 35.9% of what Americans have been able to do. This all according to the debt clock sponsored by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Taxpayers federation? We’re lagging this far behind, and some people have the nerve to even throw around some attitude about it.
The U.K debt clock chooses not to take sides between its old colonies, and settles somewhere in the middle at $1.4 trillion or $22,561 per person.
Even Japan, the most indebted G-whatever nation by debt as a % of GDP has a debt clock. How would you like you and yours to owe $94,952 each? (I find it a little ironic that people use the yen as as a haven against the US dollar. I think I’d better be selling mine).
And the Economist magazine has actually taken on doing a global debt clock, showing a tally of everyone’s public debt ($45.689 trillion they say). The only problem I see is that their numbers vary pretty dramatically from the debt clocks above. Ah well, a trillion dollars sure ain’t what it used to be.
