I’ve known this for a while, but never saw it in graphic detail. Bob Wenzel of Economicpolicyjournal, a blog I visit every day, had this infographic up on his site today.

I’ve always known China is the largest holder of US treasury debt in the world. I didn’t know that Japan was right behind.

Japan is the only country on the planet that is more into Keynesian economics than the US. As I mentioned in my last post about the bonobo chimpanzee behaving former IMF head Dominique Strauss Kahn who only attended 4 sex parties a year, Japan is somewhere between 240% and 500% in debt to GDP. Whichever number you want to pick, it’s the highest debt to GDP ratio on the planet. And Japan holds $1.24T in face value of US treasury debt.

If this isn’t a highly unstable house of cards, I really don’t know what is. The situation is just beyond any scope of reason, while the media makes you blissfully unaware of any of it or its meaning. The most indebted country in the world is being propped up by the country with the highest debt concentration in the world.

These are aftereffects of a country that destroys another with two nuclear bombs and then proceeds to nurse it back to health. How would you feel if someone beat the living crap out of you to within an inch of death and then put you on life support until you sort of recovered? You’d feel indebted. $1.24T of indebtedness.

Sooner or later some tiny domino is going to fall. If you feel like you have to sneeze, duck and cover.