Germany seem to manage it --not sure if this list is govt debt or national debt!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_current_account_balance
This is something that occured to me too. Are there any countries with no debt?
Germany seem to manage it --not sure if this list is govt debt or national debt!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_current_account_balance
Don't believe Germany has no debt.
Surely any countries which has to go to the financial markets and try to sell bonds is in debt? No?
And Germany had a bond auction partially fail only a couple of weeks ago.
From what I gather, all countries seem to be in debt. Or are China not in debt, as they seem to be lending money to the rest of the world?
And if every country is in debt, who do they owe it to?
Running a balanced budget wouldn't work. As Sunny says countries need to borrow and not all borrowing is bad, in fact it can be wealth-generating. The problem isn't borrowing per se, it's imprudent borrowing. As a rule of thumb,borrowing to fund day to day spending is bad.
But we also have a ideological, social and economic problem: we are addicted to growth, and economic growth has become the objective and measure of well-being. The inherent premise is that the more wealth the better the country, the happier the people. This is patently false, or at least substantially false. As the philosopher Khalil Gibran (The Prophet) says "Beware of comfort that enters your house as a guest and becomes the master."
Two points;
We did pay back much of our debt during the bubble years but spending was/is so out of control that our debt exploded when the bubble burst.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?