by Jerome a Paris
Wed Apr 12th, 2006 at 04:54:09 AM EST

The thick line is private sector jobs
The thin line is public sector jobs
(both measured from their 1996 level)

This one is the total indebtedness of households, as a percentage of gross household income, in various countries (note that the scales are different on the two graphs).

That last one is an attempt by CDC Ixis, the investment bank that prepared the study from which all the graphs here come from, to assess what growth would have been without the increase in household debt: each year, they deduct 50% (or 60% for the USA, presumably because it's easier to borrow to consume) of the increase in household debt from GDP growth.
It's not pretty - even for the USA, where a lot of the increase in consumption has been fuelled by public (government) debt in addition to private debt.