Euro/Pound dive against the Yen

[Malachi]

NJ5 said:

Malachi said:

The difference is that the majority of Japan debt are public debt (170% of GDP by the World Factbook) while the UK debt is mainly external(365% of GDP)

The big problem in Japan is that they doesn't have enough tax payer to fund the retirement of their aging population. That is, they are deep in the red in when it come to the money needed to run the program to take care of all these retiree and probably other social program. On one hand it's a problem they can solve internally on the other it's probably not going to be a solution these retiree are going to like.

The UK however is more at risk as seeing it's credit rating drop, in which case you can see bye bye to the economy.

Public debt = government debt

External debt includes debt owed by lots of entities (individuals, companies, etc). They're not comparable.

However you're probably right that UK owes more to foreigners than Japan does, since Japan is probably the country which borrows the most from its own citizens.

 

Most of Japan public debt is debt owed to their social program, so to their own citizen, which was my point since Japan external debt(which would include the public debt owed to foreign entitie) is only a little over 30% of GDP. So they have a lot of debt yes, but debt owed to their own citizen contrary to the UK who own a lot of debt to foreigner which would screw them over if their credit rating take a hit.