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IIRC, the answer is largely pension funds. Baby Boomers are starting to retire, and in order to do so they need to either own a bunch of debt securities or have
by ThrustVectoring 7y ago
IIRC, the answer is largely pension funds. Baby Boomers are starting to retire, and in order to do so they need to either own a bunch of debt securities or have a pension or retirement fund that does so on their behalf. In my view, this is pretty much entirely responsible for a large secular trend in indebtedness over the last several decades - retirees will need to sell off financial assets later, so the aggregate dollar value of their current financial assets has to rise as they save up for it.
- jbob2000 7y agoActually, of the $55 trillion in global debt, China owns $20 trillion. Much of this debt is going to developing countries. The rest is a mixture of private equity and governments, which would include pension funds, but they are not the largest debt holders by any means.
- littlestymaar 7y agoThere's a big confusion here: - your $55 billions is only public debt. - the private debt is way higher (more than $130 trillions). Sources: - public debt: https://www.economist.com/content/global_debt_clock https://www.economist.com/content/global_debt_clock - total debt: https://blogs.imf.org/2019/01/02/new-data-on-global-debt/ https://blogs.imf.org/2019/01/02/new-data-on-global-debt/