Can you explain your doubts? Bush is a symptom, not the disease.
If you know someone proficient in central bank reports, I'd be very happy to know the answer there.
I'm talking about debt accounting only here.
Which just goes to show what utter and complete bollocks it all is.
Smoke and mirrors screening the totally unacceptable and unsustainable Reality of a deficit-based monetary system..
Consider UK Plc: it's the only Plc with no "Equity" on the balance sheet, and with accounts which show a debt, but not the assets they are secured against.
It's as though Mig's family accounts showed the mortgage, but not the house!
Instead, we see UK Plc's "assets" consisting largely of bank-issued claims over houses - over 70% of UK money supply.
Un-effing-believable. In every sense. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
As the risk of government default is almost by definition [or in theory] negligible, government debt doesn't need to be secured, does it? Bush is a symptom, not the disease.
Of course, there is then the issue of government being acually willing to reimburse its creditors, which affect the state rating. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
Gazprom had a better rating than Russia when it was using its gas export contracts as collateral, because the only way it could default on that debt was to stop delivering gas, a much more violent step nowadays, diplomatically, than just defaulting on payments.
That's why we were happy to lend money to Gazprom, effectively taking Gaz de France risk while being paid margins sized on Russian risk (then - Russian risk today pays very little). Ah, good ol' times... In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
