Good to Know
Charlie Martin argues that those “US is bankrupt numbers” are totally wrong:
I wrote about the same comparison in PJM early in the year — can’t link it usefully, PJM has hosed something — making the correct comparison of total US assets per person versus total US obligations per person, and it was about $300K assets vs $160K obligations, or over the whole population, about $90 trillion versus $48 trillion. Most of that wealth is real stuff — land, houses, factories, etc — and hasn’t gone away in the last year.
The point is, we’re not bankrupt — we’re more like a homeowner with a mortgage. We have to keep working to make the payments.
There’s more. Read the whole thing.






I’m pretty sure the value of the land our house sits on hasn’t declined (despite our best efforts to down-class the neighborhood), and certainly our equity in it isn’t declining.
If our total household debt were declining I’d feel a lot better, but we are looking to divest ourselves of certain plastics in the coming year…