Talk:National debt of the United States: Difference between revisions

Carmen & Rogoff debt-to-GDP threshold at 90 % is gross debt NOT public debt

I emailed Carmen Reinhart about this question specifically and asked which one it is that they meant. She replied that it is gross debt, not public debt(or net debt).

Our exchange:

Hello,

I just wonder about the 90 % threshold of public debt which usually induces a GDP growth slowdown.

In the latest working paper from April this is defined as 'public debt'. Correct me if I am wrong, but the net public debt is around 68 % for the U.S.(and forecasted to rise to about mid-70s within a year or two and then stabilize).

However, America's gross debt is now over 100 %.

Which measure should be used? And can gross debt be used too for this? The term used in the working paper from April was 'public debt' - not net public debt.

I would be very happy if there was some kind of clarification on this as googling have not made me wiser!

_______________________________________________________________________________

Yes it is gross debt, which for the US is above the 90% threshold. This is the longest time series beginning in 1790. It is central (federal government), so it does not include state debt and government sponsored enterprises, which now include the two mortgage giants best Carmen

Carmen M. Reinhart Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow Peterson Institute for International Economics 1750 Massachussetts Avenue, NW Washington DC 20036-1903 tel. 202-454-1325 fax. 202-659-3225 creinhart@piie.com http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~creinhar/ www.carmenreinhart.com

_______________________________________

Wrong numbers in foreign/domestic debt ratio

This article from gao.gov: http://gao.gov/assets/650/649848.pdf , states that about 5 % of the debt is from foreign investors, on Page 18. But the wikipedia article says around 40%. The sources to this page are from the banks of the lending countries, and I would say that the US have more credible numbers, than China and Taiwan.

It's best to make that amount a cross reference. It is too hard for Wikipedians to update changing numbers in multiple places. 40% is about right in 2013.

Introduction Text

Hey, I do not know a better word, but in the first paragraph right on the start of the article (paragraph? really? dictionary is stupid or?!) at the end there is written:

On June 30, 2015, debt held by the public was $13.08 trillion or about 74% of the previous 12 months of GDP.

This is the "public debt", but we are in the National Debt article, this sentence is very... confusing for persons who have no idea what is public and what is national debt. The public debt at the Date was I would say already far over 18 trillion dollar and over 100% of the GDP. Right now we have national debt to GDP ratio according to the US Debt Clock: 103.9855% GDP debt (means whole US economy, everything what is produced, done, consumed and so on in a whole year would not be enough to pay off the debt, if the state would "shutdown", no lights, no electricity on the street, nothing, if every cent would go to debt for a whole year... If the US would be a European Country with the common problems of South-Eastern European States (Most of these are today seperated states which were created after the Balkan War, which the younger people, okay I'm young too, lets say people under 20 years old can not remember anything of any news reports or so about the Balkan War and the European and US intervention (back than the World was okay, China became oil net importer in 1993, Soviet Union just had fallen down after it carried the whole almost puppet-states, with the East-German being the best (I talked to my mother, born in Poland, and I have some family still living in today very west Poland, meaning less than 100 kilometers air distance to the German Border (which is unguarded since January or May 2004, I think May 2004, "clicks", is it military or do you really can say it to a civilian?!) problem: there is no direct route to the Border, since the border is the "Odra" (river) you have to drive north, away from us (air distance) and than in the former "Frankfurt (an der Oder)" (Frankfurt (on the Odra) to seperate from the 10-times larger city of Frankfurt in West-Germany with the highest financial buildings and I think there is the main German stock, like the NYMEX in New York, DAX it is called...

anyway I think the US CAN do it and handle it somehow without an deflation, which often occurs before the real inflation begins, and with a very large inflation ("Hyperinflation"), in this case the debt would be away without doing anything further, but it will not happen to the us dollar, the Zimbabwe-Dollar had numbers which I can not translate (since 1 billion in English is 1 "Milliarde" in German for example), it was something with 15 or 16 numbers, first two where 92 and I think followed by 12 or 14 zeros... this was the rate in PER CENT (!). It was the heaviest Inflation known or in "newer history", would be the easiest way for the US Goverment, but it would also make the rich people poor.

See here I found it:

During the height of inflation from 2008 to 2009, it was difficult to measure Zimbabwe's hyperinflation because the government of Zimbabwe stopped filing official inflation statistics. However, Zimbabwe's peak month of inflation is estimated at 79.6 billion percent in mid-November 2008.

In 2009, Zimbabwe stopped printing its currency, with currencies from other countries being used Over the course of the five-year span of hyperinflation, the inflation rate fluctuated greatly. At one point, the US Ambassador to Zimbabwe predicted that it would reach 1.5 million percent. In June 2008 the annual rate of price growth was 11.2 million percent. The worst of the inflation occurred in 2008, leading to the abandonment of the currency. The peak month of hyperinflation occurred in mid-November 2008 with a rate estimated at 79,600,000,000% per month. This resulted in US$1 becoming equivalent to the staggering sum of $Z2,621,984,228,675,650,147,435,579,309,984,228

"The United States has the largest external debt in the world."

This is misleading to readers and says nothing substantive about U.S. debt. The U.S. has the largest debt because of the country's size. The meaningful information about debt is its share to GDP or some other relative measure. Keeping this text in serves to mislead readers into thinking the US debt is a serious problem and a massive aberration when it's not by any sensible measure. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 13:59, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

The article has debt relative to GDP already before this, so the most common normalized measure is already discussed. It is a fact, which like all facts can be used in misleading ways, but is itself not deceptive. Barnhorst (talk) 15:30, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Irrelevant Information in History?

I couldn't help but notice how half of the paragraphs in the History section are about 2017-2018, with little insight on why these two years are relevant in the history of the national debt. Would it be better to shrink it down into a couple of sentences or erase it altogether? Springfield2020 (talk) 21:48, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

—————— I concur, I can only imagine it was added with the intent of making a particular administration\political party appear responsible for the US governments financial situation. There is another section labeled sustainability which blatantly does exactly what I've described. Another pressing issue with this article is the fact the history section does absolutely nothing to explain where this trend began, but to be fair it is a complex issue. With that said, It isn't hard to argue that the US's current situation is heavily influenced by the 2008 Subprime mortgage crisis and its effects, and even more importantly, the War On Terror that began in 2002. As 2002 began, the debt had slowly but surely worked its way up to 6 trillion. Year over year, it generally went up 100-200 billion at a time for the previous 20 or so years, yet from 2002-2010, we were able to destroy all the previous records and models, achieving the feat of MORE THAN DOUBLING the national debt. This makes it appear as if it were fully the G.W. Bush administration thats at fault, yet I believe several of the regulations Clinton cut and\or enacted directly lead to the financial meltdown of the 2000s housing market. As far as i know, these are the primary causes that have lead to our current debt situation in the US, being that the rate of incurring debt since then has slowed very little if at all year over year. We have been stuck in the Negative loop ever since we spent 5 trillion to attack the middle east.

In my opinion, for anyone to attempt to attribute this situation to the legacy of Obama or Trump is simply comical. Trying to do so implies a ignorance of recent US history, or an obvious political bias. (I will more then likely post a slightly modified version of this regarding the section under the "Sustainability" heading, as it is blatant in its political bias.) EZ CRIMSON (talk) 05:53, 1 August 2021 (UTC) ——————