The Greatest Debt Crisis The World Has Ever Seen Is Coming

It is kind of like watching a slow-motion train wreck that you have no chance of possibly stopping that you know will end up killing lots of innocent people.  This debt crisis is going to end up destroying the global financial system, but there is not a thing that you or I can do to prevent it from happening. The unprecedented debt binge that we are witnessing right now is going to continue until someday we hit a brick wall of financial disaster.  We can yell and we can scream, but it isn’t going to stop what is happening.

As the Telegraph recently noted, even the Bank for International Settlements is warning that debt levels are way too high.  According to the BIS, total public and private debt levels are now 30 percent higher than they were in 2008…

“This looks like to me like 2007 all over again, but even worse,” said William White, the BIS’s former chief economist, famous for flagging the wild behavior in the debt markets before the global storm hit in 2008.

“All the previous imbalances are still there. Total public and private debt levels are 30pc higher as a share of GDP in the advanced economies than they were then, and we have added a whole new problem with bubbles in emerging markets that are ending in a boom-bust cycle,” said Mr White, now chairman of the OECD’s Economic Development and Review Committee.

The BIS can see the disaster coming, but even they have no chance of preventing it.

For the rest of this article, I am going to focus on government debt, but please keep in mind that corporate debt and consumer debt are also totally out of control globally.  It would be very hard to overstate the nightmare that we are facing.

But of course national governments are the biggest offenders when it comes to debt…

Asia

Japan now has a debt to GDP ratio of more than 211 percent, and as Simon Black of the Sovereign Man blog recently detailed, they are rapidly heading toward a national financial meltdown…

Looking purely at the numbers, Japan’s medium-term fundamentals are among the bleakest in the world.

Total government debt amounts to over 200% of the country’s entire GDP– a figure so large that the Japanese government spends 51.5% of the 43 trillion yen ($430 billion) they collect in tax revenue just to pay interest!

Perhaps even more astounding is that ‘primary balance expenses,’ i.e. normal government expenditures, totaled 70.3 trillion yen, or 163% of tax revenue.

The only way they’ve managed to stay afloat is by issuing more debt, which makes the problem even worse. In fact, 46% of the 2013 budget is being financed by debt.
These guys are running out of rope. And fast.

China is facing a different sort of a problem.  In that nation, the growth of private domestic debt is wildly out of control.

According to a recent World Bank report, private domestic debt in China has grown from 9 trillion dollars in 2008 to 23 trillion dollars today.

There is no way that is sustainable, and at some point that massive bubble is going to burst.

Europe

Even though some European nations have supposedly implemented “austerity measures” in recent years, debt levels continue to rise rapidly.  The following are some numbers that were recently released which show that government debt to GDP ratios for some of the most financially troubled nations in Europe are absolutely soaring…

• Euroarea: 92.2%, up from 88.2% a year ago
• Greece: 160.5%, up from 136.5% a year ago
• Italy: 130.3%; up from 123.8% a year ago
• Portugal: 127.2%, up from 112.3% a year ago
• Ireland: 125.1%, up from 106.8% a year ago
• Spain: 88.2%, up from 73.0% a year ago
• Netherlands: 72.0%, up from 66.7% a year ago

Anyone that tells you that the crisis in Europe is “over” is lying to you.  The debt crisis is getting worse, not better.