Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
The BBC has a smart graphic to illustrate:

Oh yes, please be seated when checking the US's role.

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15748696

Finally to those who decry simplicity yes there are gaps, such as how much is owed to PRC.
I could puke when I see such terrible statistics, for they've been presented by utterly incompetent people.

People NEED TO LEARN the difference between gross debt and net debt and START TO IGNORE gross debt, and instead look at net debt.

That page says 50,659 € foreign debt per German.
Some commenter on my blog came with the same useless stat (4.2 trillion) recently.
FACT is that we have NET foreign ASSETS in excess of 12,000 € per German.

This
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_int...tment_position
plus this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign...hange_reserves
is what to look at when you're interested in the accumulated relations with foreign countries.

Germany ran a trade balance surplus during the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's and 00's (even when both states were added). Of course do we have net foreign assets. Everything else would be extremely illogical.


So why would anyone who's not clueless look at gross foreign debt instead?

Probably for sensationalism, ignoring the utterly misleading effect on the vast majority of the readers.