Ask the Greeks how many people want to buy their bonds right now. You ultimately have to make bond investors happy that they will a) get paid back, b) get paid back in currency that hasn’t lost massive value in the future.
It’s always different, until it isn’t.
Only third-world nations get to behave that way. Admittedly, we’re looking more and more like one ourselves…
The US is not Greece. We have our own currency and debt that is held in that currency just for starters.
I don’t know what all of you are talking about. This story is just about a whole bunch of zeros. That’s it. You could as easily say that the Japanese national debt went past a quadrillion and one dollars. It’s just a bunch of zeros. Story over.
I can’t count how many times I have seen reporters mix up millions and billions.
The reason is simple. Billion has different values, depending on whether you are using Short scale or Long scale. So a billion might mean a thousand million in USA and million millions here in Europe.
Wikipedia article.
Just like with the use of inches versus millimeters or use of “pound” as a measurement for the force (the correct unit is Newton), Americans do it wrong ;-). And even sensible British have taken to use this system of number notation.
Some people seem to be thinking that this is about Japan’s foreign or external debt. It’s not. It’s about the Japanese government’s budget deficit. Most of that money is owed to Japanese banks. Japan has the second largest reserve of foreign currency in the world. This is not a situation of international governments getting nervous about getting the money they are owed.
“Perfectly happy” is an euphemism if I’ve ever seen one. Institutional investors are fairly content with China and other suckers guaranteeing US debt, because they like to run business as usual (or at least make it look like it). Also, some of their own (European) debt is US-backed, so if the US goes down, we’re all screwed together. So… smile to customers and keep selling, boys!
１千兆 still looks really cool though. Not to mention that big numbers are grouped the same way they are in English when written in Western numerals, i.e. in groups of three zeroes. Example: “one million” is 百万 = １００万 = “100 ten-thousand,” yet it’s still often written as “1,000,000.”
Most of it is domestically held.
Actually, no it’s not. It can be measured with hard data. If international markets thought the US debt was unmanageable, our bonds would be worth less, and interest rates would rise. This is not a matter of opinion.
Big ol’ LOL there, heheh thanks. I used to annoy people with the whole “doll hairs” line as a kid 
Long scale versus short scale mistakes might be understandable in an international publication but not in a domestic US one. We are uniformly short scale country as is most of the English speaking world. If a domestic US paper states the US deficit as $600 million, it is because they have failed to edit properly or failed grasp the correct magnitude of the deficit.
The fact that there isn’t anywhere better where to move your money at the moment, doesn’t mean that things are peachy. Modern finance is incredibly fragile, like it was repeatedly proved in the last 5 years.
What heckblazer said, plus I’d point out that the act of creating debt to “finance” money printing is a largely pointless exercise in the first place. The only reason nations sell debt to offset money printing is that it forces governments into hock to powerful financial interests. It forces governments to go hat in hand to those very same bond vigilantes you love to worry about. Government should not be subordinated to wealthy interests, and in the world of fiat currencies it is a total anachronism.
If you insist on repeating the same old tired economic mantras, it behoves you to learn something of MMT. Neoclassical and neo-Keynesian economics get most everything important wrong with how modern economies work. They also posit ridiculous and long-disproven myths about human behavior and dynamic systems. Its as if economics never left the 19th century in many respects, while the rest of science is well into the 21st. If econ is a pseudoscience then neoclassical econ is alchemy.
Doll Hairs: they’re not worth nothing
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