Economy

The Government Debt Ponzi

Dysfunctional Bond Markets – A Comparison of Yields

Below we show the 10 year government bond yields of three countries: Spain, Japan and the United States. Also shown are budget deficits and total public debt as a percentage of GDP. It would actually make more sense to look at deficits as a percentage of tax revenues. The comparison of debt to GDP seems not to make a lot of sense intuitively, as governments cannot pay their debts out of ‘GDP’, but only out of tax revenues (note also that there are slight differences in the GDP calculations).

Anyway, the point is mainly to compare the three countries, as both Spain’s and Japan’s bond yields essentially reflect zero risk at this point. In fact, investors seem to assume that the combination of inflation risk and default risk in Spain and Japan is lower than in the US, which strikes us as slightly absurd, if only for “technical” reasons. An overview of annual CPI rates of change is shown as well.  Also included above the bond yield charts are the credit ratings assigned by the three big credit rating agencies (in this order: S&P, Moody’s, Fitch).

http://www.acting-man.com/?p=31039

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