4 ms·

Scandinavian countries have some of the highest external debt per Capita, good job spending money you don't really own.

• mjn 13y ago
  Did you check net external debt? One side of the debt equation (which is what the "external debt" figures show) is not a particularly interesting figure. If you owe people $75 billion, and they owe you $100 billion, you are "$75 billion in debt" by the external-debt statistic, but "$25 billion in the black" by the definition of indebtedness most people use. There are specific technical uses for external debt, but it does not equate to "spending money you don't really own". The figure that nets these out is the "net international investment position", which subtracts liabilities from assets. The Scandinavian countries have very good positions here. Denmark's NIIP is +27% of GDP, versus the U.S.'s -17%. The Scandinavian countries have high debt positions basically because they are advanced (i.e. highly financialized) economies with good credit ratings, so make a lot of use of cheap bonds. Same reason Apple issued a bunch of bonds last year despite their huge cash pile. Due to some quirks at the moment Denmark is actually making money on their bonds, as they are issued at negative interest rates— there has been an influx of EUR into DKK due to fears over the EUR, and to discourage that influx (to protect its pegged exchange rate) Denmark is offering negative rates...
• dragonwriter 13y ago
  External debt per capita is a pretty silly measure; external debt to GDP ratio would be more sane to care about, and, on that measure, the Scandinavian countries aren't particularly bad compared to, say, most of Western Europe. This is in addition to mjn's sibling post noting why "external debt" may not be the right thing to be concerned about to start with.