The Seven Countries Most Vulnerable To A Debt Crisis

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For decades, some of the most impor­tant data about mar­ket economies was sim­ply unavail­able: the lev­el of pri­vate debt. You could get gov­ern­ment debt data eas­i­ly, but (with the out­stand­ing excep­tion of the USA—and also Aus­tralia) it was hard to come by.

That has been reme­died by the Bank of Inter­na­tion­al Set­tle­ments, which now pub­lish­es a quar­ter­ly series on debt—government & private—for over 40 coun­tries. This data lets me iden­ti­fy the sev­en coun­tries that, on my analy­sis, are most like­ly to suf­fer a debt cri­sis in the next 1–3 years. They are, in order of like­ly sever­i­ty: Chi­na, Aus­tralia, Swe­den, Hong Kong (though it might deserve first billing), Korea, Cana­da, and Nor­way.

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About Steve Keen

I am Professor of Economics and Head of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University London, and a long time critic of conventional economic thought. As well as attacking mainstream thought in Debunking Economics, I am also developing an alternative dynamic approach to economic modelling. The key issue I am tackling here is the prospect for a debt-deflation on the back of the enormous private debts accumulated globally, and our very low rate of inflation.