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Kasz216 on 05 February 2010
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kowenicki said:
NJ5 said:
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.

 

I think perhaps the reason why it is seen as worse is becuase these countries have less options and less control.... they cant just print money like the US, UK and Japan can or move interest rates to suit themselves.  It would mean printing Euro's and moving the Euro rate and this would have a negative impact other nations in better shape.

California has almost exactly the same debt problems as Greece, and yet this isnt seen as anywhere near as bad due partly to sentiment, but also becuase they have many more option in the US to deal with it.

I dunno.  California's debt problems are seen as quite serious in the US.

People and buisnesses are rapidly fleeing and California isn't willing to make the needed cuts.  They may end up a much nicer weathered Michigan soon.  They keep acting like the Federal government is going to bail them out... but I don't see it.

They keep defaulting on debts and eventually it's going to catch up with them.

 

The "best" part was when California issued IOU's... then expected companys to pay taxes...on those IOUS!

Apparently they expect a 21 BILLION dollar shortfall.

 

California may actually default... neither side of politicians will budge to save themselves.   It may be what sets off the second financial crisis.

 

 

They need to make HUGE spending cuts... because they can't really raise taxes.  People and companies already are leaving because of the huge ass taxes in California.