$250 Trillion in Debt: The World’s Post-Lehman Legacy
Reminder: $250t debt is $250t assets on someone else's balance sheet. The money is not owed to aliens but to other humans.<p>Finding who is is owed to is harder. A big chunk is pension funds, insurers and so on, where one person's debt is another person's retirement savings. Which must increase overall as life past retirement does.<p>But a large chunk is assets of financial industries and the super wealthy, and in order for it to be net paid down <i>they have to get poorer</i> - or at least be forced to reallocate to equities.<p>(Note also that as interest rates drive ever lower debt naturally expands too. If they can be driven <i>negative</i> it becomes an advantage.)