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Japan's debt is 200% of GDP, and is frequently used as an excuse to bump up American debt. "Why worry about debt when Japan is ok with double our debt?" The reason why Japan can have such high debt is that their interest rates have been near 0 for over a decade, and they have had slow/no growth for that time.
Japan has a captive market for bonds, the Japanese people. The Japanese people tolerate the low return, and so the interest payments have been extraordinarily low. But as this recent article alludes to, no country can amass debt forever:
"FOR years foreign observers gave warning that Japan’s combination of economic stagnation and rising public debt was unsustainable. Over the past two decades the country has stumbled in and out of deflation, slipped down the global league tables on many social indicators and amassed the largest gross public debt-to-GDP ratio in the world (a whopping 190%). Yet government-bond yields have remained stubbornly low and living standards, by and large, are high. Visit the country and you will see no outward sign of crisis. Politicians and policymakers have bickered and schemed, but have mostly chosen to leave things as they are.
That cannot go on much longer. The figures are getting worse. Japan urgently needs radical policies to tackle the problems, and new leaders to implement them."
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