"It becomes quite frightening when a country's debt level is reaching or surpassing its GDP."<p>This sentence and the accompanying graph told me as much as I needed to know about the author. Debt is total and GDP is annual. If having a debt greater than your GDP is an intrinsic problem, imagine how much worse off we'd be if the earth went around the sun twice as fast. (And yes, I realize that would be a problem for other reasons.)