The world-wide debt is increasing at so fast a rate that it may never be fixed. Unlike the board game Monopoly, It cannot be wiped out and start all over. Eventually, like a house on fire, it it will go to ashes, and do you know who the clean-up crew will be after the firemen have left? The communists, the socialists, and every form of collectivist. They will point out how capitalism failed, and that what is needed is a government in which everything is spread out equally, blah, b'blahblah, blah blah. Welcome to the dark ages. Not brought to you by war, but by debt.

always follow the money...who is going to collect on all this debt....the invisible oligarchy...

I have seen an analysis of government debt against revenues, instead of against GDP. It makes more sense if you think of the analogy of applying for a mortgage. Your bank wants to know your salary, not the total money available to your employer from which he pays your salary (just like government does not have access to ALL of GDP).

I cannot find the article right now, but the result was quite shocking. Greece actually looked better than the US, because even though the US has higher GDP per capita, the tax rates are much lower.

It is correct to say that all the big economies have massive debt, and some smaller economies have dangerous levels.
But there is a point the article makes that should be considered. Yes the size of debt matters, but who owns the debt may be quite important. The article is suggesting that for China there is such a level of interlinking that the risk of instability is low.

Watched a University Marxist economist explain why capitalism would ultimately fail. While he pointed out several very bad problems in the US economy and blamed it on free market capitalism he was right about the problems and wrong about the cause. Each problem had been caused by the use of forced economic solutions which are caused by the state not the freedom to choose what you will buy in a free market system. The problem with this prediction of whether or not an economy might fail is based on predicting the outcome of a socialist economy. Saying that China may not go bust because of controverted formulas based on GDP vs money supply fails to observe an economy that has built "ghost cities" in order to spend money to make the economy grow. Amazing to see cities that could house millions with only a few thousand living there. Not enough people to turn out the lights at night. This is in no way a sound economy.

There is no reason for the US government to default. Because its debt is in dollars, it can ‘print’ as much as it needs to make payments. Two points here: it doesn’t actually ‘print’ the dollars and you’ll get the money but….

As to printing, the Fed and the Treasury swap debt (aka monetize it) so that each hold the others notes.
These are mostly computer entries, with no paper trading between them. Officially the Fed buys Treasury notes/bonds with its Federal Reserve Notes. Both of these are debt instruments, only payable in other debt instruments. No longer are Treasury notes/bonds redeemable in anything other then Federal reserve notes, which are also ‘notes’ or promises to pay. However the promise to pay is only in more paper.

Once I realized how the government fiddles the money I knew I’d get the social security and military retirement I earned, only the money would not buy much. Since I retired, my income in real terms has gone down every year even though I get more dollars. The cost of living adjustments are never enough to offset the devaluation of the money.

China, Russia, and others would like to stop using the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and there is some movement in that direction. When it happens we’ll be getting baskets of paper that will be more useful in the bath room then anywhere else.

Are the numbers shown generally adjusted for inflation?