> I'm not 100 on how you can have internal debt and external surplus, sorry. You'll have to talk to someone smarter for that. In the simplest case, suppose the

> I'm not 100 on how you can have internal debt and external surplus, sorry. You'll have to talk to someone smarter for that. In the simplest case, suppose the government of an export-heavy country such as Germany, Japan or China simply stopped collecting taxes for a year. It would be self-evident that their government would run a large budgetary deficit no matter how large their export surplus for that year was.