The idea of the "world debt level" being alarming doesn't make a lot of sense to me. There isn't anyone else we _could_ owe money to, right? I'm not educated enough in global finance to have a useful opinion in this, but imagine the following scenario:<p><pre><code> * Country A owes $100M to Country B
* Country B owes $100M to Country C
* Country C owes $100M to Country A
</code></pre>
Here, the "world debt level" is $300M. But if country C pays $100M to country A, who then pays it to country B, who then pays it to country C, you'll have settled all three debts and no net money changed hands.<p>If you multiplied all the debts here by a factor of 1,000,000, you'd get a "$100T fiscal timebomb" for each country. But how much of a big deal is that in this hypothetical scenario when they don't, on a net basis, actually owe any money at all?
Overall, the US is doing things that were supposed to be impossible a few decades ago. And Treasury keeps printing money. More importantly, the debt markets are relatively healthy.<p>Nobody talks about 'crowding out' anymore.<p>I don't follow monetary policy anymore, but I do know this era is unique and the old rules really don't apply anymore. The fact is, there aren't really any good places to put your money except for the US, and the Us is taking full advantage of that.
Maybe this time is different for real, but people make this sort of prediction or warning every year for as long as I can remember. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq have consistently posted annual double-digit real returns. So what? What do we do with this information? Yeah, there is a lot of debt, but the economy is bigger too.