debtThis chart shows, that the per capita government debt of U.S., Ireland and Italy is worse than Greece. Still, Greece has all the attention and trouble because of their debt. That makes me wonder what can be really deduced from the per capita debt and what other factors are more important so that Greece gets all the attention.
Very little. As you can see here by the dynamic equation for public debt, the key drivers are: a) nominal interest rates (the spread vs. Germany has been rising as investors have dumped Greek bonds - remember there is an inverse relationship between the price of a bond and the implicit interest rate), b) the rate of economic growth (prospects in Greece are dismal for the time being with all the uncertainty), and finally whether a country has the ability or not to print its way of of its fiscal problem (UK and US still have control over their currencies, so theoretically this is still possible).
At best, one can deduce that countries with a higher GNP / GDP can carry more debt, in the same way that a millionaire can carry more debt than a guy straight out of college.
A much better measure of debt is the debt to GDP ratio. It can be thought of in terms similar to the debt load of an individual.
Along these measures, the US has a debt ratio of about 60%, whereas Greece just made steps to cut their debt to GDP down to 115%, although many experts believe that Greece will be inching back up to 160% in the near future.
This ratio explains why bond yields are sane in Germany and the US, bad in Italy, and catastrophic in Greece. There is no accepted cutoff point, but a higher debt ratio is always considered bad.
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