European Government Debt and Interest Costs for 2024

 Eurostat published the latest figures for European Union Government debt and interest payments in 2024 a few weeks ago. You can find the original data here, but as usual I have extracted the key figures and put them in a table 

If we look at all the 27 European Union countries, government debt now exceeds €14.5 trillion - up 4.9% in a single years. Two countries - Ireland and Cyprus - actually managed to get their debt levels down a bit. But for others, the increases have been dramatic, led by Estonia, Poland, and Romania whose debt levels have all increased by over 20% in a single year.

But, for me, the really depressing figures concern the amount of money that Europe's citizens have handed over in Interest charges. This year, the total reached €335 billion - up 15.63% in  a year. I live in France, and my government has handed over €60.3 billion in interest - a major slice of government expenditure, and up 24.7% in a single year. But even countries like Germany have seen their interest payments increase by over 25%. Austria's interest costs shot up by 30.9%. Finland's went up by nearly 40%! Only Sweden seems to have avoided these massive increases in interest costs.

For me these payments make no sense. We know from Modern Monetary Theory that governments can effectively create money by getting Central banks to create additional money. It's called Quantitative Easing. They could, get the central banks such as the ECB to buy up government debt. And if that happened, taxpayers would no longer need to keep paying all those interest payments. Imagine what Europe could do with the €335 billion that is currently being spent to make investors richer. 

And if you think about how much money has been handed over to "investors" since 2000, the numbers are eye-watering. This wonderful scheme has meant that collectively, European taxpayers have forked out €6.9 trillion. That's a very substantial proportion of the government debt.