Euro/Pound dive against the Yen

[NJ5]

kowenicki said:

NJ5 said:

Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy together account for 40% of the eurozone's debt.

Ummm, this looks a bit like misleading statistics to me. Those countries added together have 133 million people, what is the population of the Eurozone?

EU population is 500 million, take 61m off for UK, 10m off for Sweden, 5m off for Denmark (which are not in the Eurozone) and that makes it at most 425 million people in the Eurozone. So those countries make up more than 30% of the population.

thats a mis-represenation though....

If you weighted those populations in terms of wealth then it would be a much worse statistic.

Yes they may be 30% of the population, but they do not represent anywhere near 30% of the wealth and thus 40% of the debt is huge, remember all of those countries are net takers from the EU too.

True. I guess it would be better to calculate via GDP. (as an aside, I just found the Eurozone population is 328 million, quite less than I estimated)

But let's do it with GDP and see what happens (figures are in billions of US$, for 2008):

Portugal: 245
Spain: 1602
Italy: 2314
Greece: 358
Ireland: 268

Total: 4787
Eurozone total: 14275

So it's 33% calculated with GDP, for 40% of debt. A little bit higher, but not that much.