Global Private Sector Debt at the end of 2014 - over $100 trillion

The Bank for International Settlements compiles data about the level of Private (Non-financial sector) debt for 39 different countries every quarter. The latest set of data (published as an excel file on the 8th of June 2015) covers the period until the end of 2014.

It's a pretty complicated set of data, but I have extracted the main numbers in the following table which provides information for 39 countries. 12 of them are in the Eurozone countries, but BIS also provides a figure for the entire Eurozone - only 7% of the debt is held by the other 7 countries. The table also includes another 27 other countries, and I have converted all,the debt values into dollars using the exchange rate for 2014 from the World Bank.

You can see that Private Sector Debt is highest in the US, where debt had reached $25.5 trillion, followed by China with $19.8 trillion, and Japan with $7.9 trillion. Then comes a series of European countries - France with $4.8 trillion, the UK with $4.7 trillion, Germany with roughly $4.0 trillion and so forth. I was surprised to see that even countries like Canada and Australia have private sector debt levels of €3.5 trillion and $2.8 trillion respectively. That's huge, given their relatively small populations.

Total Eurozone Private Sector Debt stands at €16.6 trillion (over $20.7 trillion dollars).

Altogether, the total (Eurozone debt, plus the other countries) exceeds $102 trillion. And that's just 39 countries. Incidentally, I think these numbers are really correct - they certainly fit with the figures provided in a recent report by the McKinsey institute which reported figures for global Household and Corporate Debt of $40 trillion and $56 trillion respectively.

Let's assume that the Banks that created all that debt are charging interest at around 5% interest per annum - a round number which is probably not that far off the mark. After all, remember that Credit Card companies will happily charge  you 15-20%. That would mean that around $5 trillion in interest charges are being sucked out of people's pockets every year. Not far off $1000 for every person on the planet. Given that many of them don't earn anything like that much, you can begin to see the scale of the racket.

And that's without counting the 5.5% of all the taxes that we in Europe pay that goes to feeding the parasitic banking sector because our governments have agreed to borrow trillions from them as well. To be precise - over €12 trillion in the European Union, over £1.6 trillion in the UK, over €18 trillion in the US.  McKinsey puts the Global figure for Government debt at $58 trillion.

Would anyone care to explain to me why this system, in which Commercial Banks have been given the right to create debt by lending money they don't have and then charging everyone - citizens, businesses and governments interest, is a good idea?

It is certainly a good idea for the 1% at the top of the system who rake all this money in. It is an unmitigated disaster for the other 99% of us.

Our governments should be creating our money supply debt free and allow us to get the parasites off our backs, because the current system is clearly a total disaster.