Top 10 Nations With Jaw-Dropping Levels of Foreign Debt

12/03/09 Stockholm, Sweden – Foreign debt has come under greater than usual scrutiny in the wake of Dubai’s debacle, and one way to root out the next likely candidate for a sovereign debt crisis is to look at gross external debt. It’s a measure that includes a nation’s government, citizen, and corporate debt held by foreign entities.

The Huffington Post used Q2 2009 data from the World Bank to apply this measure and rank the top ten countries leading the way in running up gross external debt. In order of increasing debt, the biggest offenders are:

#10 Luxembourg — $1.994 trillion

#9 Japan — $2.132 trillion

#8 Ireland — $2.386 trillion

#7 Spain — $2.409 trillion

#6 Netherlands — $2.452 trillion

#5 Italy — $2.567 trillion

#4 France — $5.021 trillion

#3 Germany — $5.208 trillion

#2 United Kingdom — $9.087 trillion

#1 United States of America– $13.454 trillion

See the full details in The Huffington Post’s slideshow of 10 countries with enormous foreign debt bills.

Rocky Vega

Rocky Vega is a regular contributor to The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.

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