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The author doesn't understand that Japan's debt is denominated in its own sovereign currency -- which it can theoretically devalue -- while Greece's loans are in Euros.

Japan's debt is truly stupendous but we here in the US devalued our old debt by a factor of 3 between 1967 and 1983 thanks to good ol' dollar devaluation. The national debt even went down a bit in real terms thanks to that wacky inflation in the late 70s.

Japan would LOVE to have the yen back up at Y240, where it belongs. Well, maybe not, given that it's still dependent on oil imports and getting all that cheap labor from China must be nice.

As for Japan's debt itself -- 909,000,000,000,000 yen debt . . . that's a lot of debt!

In 2020 there will be 22M men aged 20-50 . . . and the national debt will be around 1,200,000,000,000,000. (That's 1.2 quadrillion yen)

The per-man interest burden alone on this debt (@ 3%) will be Y130,000 per month, that's $1700/month just to meet the interest burden.

Maybe I won't be moving back to Japan this decade. Damn . . .

Now, 90% of this debt is owed to Japanese nationals, so what it really means is that Japan has sold debt instead of taxing its citizens enough.

We have a $14T national debt now, and by 2020 it will probably be $20T -- that's a $750/mo interest burden @ 3% for the ~60M men of working age in 2020.

I think I need to learn Canadian.

Thanks again, Troy. I had a feeling you would comment first. Most of your posts are informative. Let's see who else is interested in this topic. There is another link up there from Krugman at MIT.

I read through this post but I had to go back a bit to dig it up...some good stuff here.
http://patrick.net/?p=27340

cheers.

Debt that can be repaid with currency that you have the ability to print represents a tiny burden compared to debt that must be repaid with currency that you do not have the ability to print.