The clock is ticking every second someone in the world takes on more public debt. The idea of a debt clock for an individual nation is familiar to anyone who has been to New York where the American public debt is revealed. The United States has incurred and carried debt owed by its own citizens since its inception.

The public debt is the amount of money the government has borrowed to cover the outstanding balance of expenses incurred over time it is similar to a person using a credit card for purchases and not paying off the full balance each month. The Global Debt Clock shows the global figure of public debt for almost all governments in dollars it covers 99% of the world based upon gross domestic product (“GDP”). Comparing a country’s debt to its GDP reveals the country’s ability to pay down its debt. This ratio is considered a better indicator of a country’s fiscal situation than just the public debt number because it shows the burden of debt relative to the country’s total economic output and therefore its ability to repay it. For example, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio surpassed 100% when both debt and GDP were approximately 16.7 trillion in 2013. The European debt crisis often also referred to as the eurozone crisis or the European sovereign debt crisis was a multi-year debt crisis that took place in the European Union (EU) from 2009 until the mid to late 2010s where several eurozone member states (Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and Cyprus) were unable to repay or refinance their government debt or to bail out over-indebted banks.

Does it matter? Senior Vice President and Economist David Andolfatto examined this issue in a Regional Economist article titled “Does the National Debt Matter?” “In particular, it seems more accurate to view the national debt less as form of debt and more as a form of money in circulation,” he wrote. What is the money supply? Is it important? Zimbabwe used to have a Z$100,000,000,000,000 bank note representing - one trillion Zimbabwean dollars. The one trillion Zimbabwean dollars are clearly reminiscent of the infamous crisis in the Weimar Republic to the more recent cases like Venezuela illustrating the commonalities in causes such as excessive money printing as various euro-zone governments have done coupled with economic mismanagement, and significant political or economic shocks can produce changes in public confidence in a government issuing fiat money that may be enough to make the fiat currency worthless.

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