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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (107162)	1/9/2012 7:09:29 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 149317

First of all, its 200%; not 300%. - tejek Here's the latest estimate I could find from the IMF: Japan’s debt-to-GDP ratio is 234.1 percent, according to 2011 estimates of the International Monetary Fund. http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/111815/in-the-know-debt-to-gdp-ratio Yes, its closer to 200% than 300%. Secondly, the Japanese have been sustaining that debt for at least 30 years. - tejek Many developed countries have been racking up debt to unsustainable levels, and if they were able, financing that debt through savings or printed dollars. That has driven interest rates to record breaking lows. That is usually the signal that we've reached the tipping point. Think of it this way. Japan has been financing its debt through the savings of its people. So most pension funds and savings funds are now loaded with government debt. However, the most recent trend has been that Japan's workforce is aging very rapidly. Their old people are also retiring at a very rapid clip and are beginning to USE THEIR SAVINGS. That means, they sell off the government debt to use it for current expenditures. The Japanese people are no longer NET BUYERS, but are instead NET SELLERS of Japanese government bonds. This is a disaster waiting to happen for the government, which has been relying on the Japanese saver for at least two decades to finance its ballooning deficits. In every sense, the experience that Japan is about to go through will be an excellent case study for what will happen in the US, as our own Baby Boomers retire and we finance our massive deficits in the face of a low savings rate. We're going Japanese, but the Japanese are there already. They are our blue print. Japan will go first, then Europe and the US, then China. The reckoning is coming. The world is awash in debt and it needs to delever either in a structured way, which I prefer, or in the way you and this administration and Japan has chosen, which is delevering imposed on us by market forces. MM, there is no indication that Japan is in trouble..........at least not from their debt. They may get into trouble with their aging population and xenophobia which discourages young immigrants. But there is nothing to suggest that their debt will be their undoing. Why doesn't the US have Japan's problems with our boomer population? Because we are not xenophobic and have a healthy in migration coupled with a much stronger birth rate.