if i were american i wouldn't worry about foreigners owning american debt. if i were a foreigner, i'd worry about owning american debt.

remember the old saw, "if you you owe the bank ten thousand dollars, it owns you. if you owe the bank ten billion dollars, you own it."

just as an aside, is there any country in the world that's actually out of debt?
if there is, then it's the one who will be left holding the bag if everybody else defaults at once. and if they are all in debt, then who the hell do they owe the money to, anyway?

maybe the debtor countries of the world could form a cartel, they could call it "organization of debt exporting companies", or "odec". they could simply dictate to the lender states how much, if any, they intended to pay back, when, and at what interest rate. if the lenders refused, they wouldn't get anything back at all, the lenders would have to negotiate because they only have one export, loans! they need people borrowing money from them or their ious are worthless paper.

yeah, yeah, tell me i'm naive and don't understand elementary economics. but my bills are all caught up, i don't owe anybody squat and it's all those smug "experts" who are in deep doo-doo. the only time you really need to worry about paying off your loans is if you plan to borrow more in the future, or if your creditor is bigger and stronger than you are.

you see, i think the whole thing is a fraud designed to keep people working way past closing time. there is no difference between a government printing currency and a bank loaning money, or a company selling stock it doesn't have, then collecting interest which materializes magically out of nowhere. the whole financial system is a joke based on the rules of a game designed by a group of players no one ever gets to meet. and by selling short, it makes money no matter what happens. it is not based on any real commodity or labor values.

think about it, gold, (a worthless metal), represents "real" wealth, (whatever that is). but gold can be substituted by paper currency (also intrinsically worthless), which can be substituted by bank checks, securities, financial instruments, ledger entries, ious and magnetized spots on digital files, all worthless. the whole system is based on symbols someone who lives very well gets to define for the rest of us.

real value is based on raw materials and human labor, real cost is determined only by what someone is willing to pay for something, which is why rare baseball cards can be bought by collectors for tens of thousands of dollars, and foreclosed houses stand empty while homeless people live on subway grates. everything else, the whole system, is a fraud.

we need currency, finance, credit and all the rest strictly as a bookkeeping convenience, a symbolic shorthand to help us keep score, to keep track of who owes what to whom. the bean counters and middlemen have turned it into an end in itself, have made the symbols more important than what they represent, and they have done it in such a way they always get to live well, and we have to work our butts off. and when the system fails, which it seems to do with monotonous regularity, the rest of us suffer and get the blame.