• Skua@kbin.earth
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      3 days ago

      National government debts are usually owed to a variety of domestic banks, private investors, and similar interests. I don’t know about China for sure, but I’ve never seen anything indicating that it’s different in this regard. Not much of it, as a proportion, is owed to foreign governments or investors. So far as I’m aware, the main unusual things about China’s government debt is that Chinese citizens have a high savings rate (meaning banks holding those savings have more to work with as creditors) and the provincial governments have quite a lot of debt (potentially almost as much as the central government when added up, though I don’t know where to get reliable numbers for this)

        • Skua@kbin.earth
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          3 days ago

          Money is only useful if people trust that they’ll get what they expect for it. A government can make a nationalised bank take a decision like that, but who’s going to use that currency if the government just snaps its fingers and makes 100 trillion yuan of everyone’s money disappear?

    • copacetic@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 days ago

      For the US, only the state is debtor for the last years, while households, businesses, and foreigners are creditors.

      The key word to search for “sectoral balances”. I could not quickly find any good and recent data for the EU or China though. For Germany, state and foreigners are debtors, but that is probably not true for the whole EU.