Financial Sector Debt as a Percentage of GDP

You can see in this graph from The Economist (with data from Mckinsey) that the United Kingdom, Japan and France have the highest Financial Debt for the selected countries. As for household debt are the emerging countries the ones with the lowest financial debt. Also for financial debt the United Kingdom is the country with the highest amount, as is the case with the total debt (which you were able to see in this post.

Due to a request by the Economist this graph has been removed. 

View the graph here

Total Debt (Private & Public) 2000-2011

Mckinsey published its follow up on one of my favorite papers. The series is called Debt and Deleveraging. Debt as in countries taking on more debt and deleveraging as in bringing down the debt levels. This graph shows the total debt for some selected countries, which consists of public (government) and private (household, non-financial firms and financial firms) debt. 

As you can see Total Debt is extremely high in Japan and in the U.K. Spain and France have high debt levels as well. South Korea seems to have about average total debt. It would be interesting and a better comparison to see more countries. Also debt is not the only thing that matters. If you look at balance sheets for the public and private actors, as individual companies, it is ofcourse also important to look at the assets.

Mckinsey Photostream on Flickr