When small countries default on their national debt are teeter on the brink of default, large countries often provide a bailout -- using IMF, central bank borrowing, etc...

The main reason Japan survived to reach 240% debt-to-GDP (far past when most countries default), is because Japanese citizens kept blindly buying additional government IOUs by bleeding down their substantial savings previously invested elsewhere. It looks like that game has just about run its course...

Here in the U.S. our national debt is around 100% of GDP, but that amounts to about $17.5 trillion -- the biggest national debt in human history. We will never be able to reach 240% before defaulting, because we have no savings to bleed down.

And unlike Greece, there is no bigger country out there who can bail us out. When our economy collapses, future historians will update the history books to say that the Roman Empire's collapse is no longer the worst in human history... I weep for our country.

I remember back in the eighties when I was in college we were supposed to be more like Japan. The mantra from the left was we could learn a lot from Japan. Well---We could learn a lot from Japan.

We are going down the same road, but we'll get there faster because we don't have a big pile of domestic savings to plunder.