Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Be Not Made a Beggar by Banqueting on Borrowing

Apropos of the last post, here's a scatter plot of trade deficit and public debt.

No real pattern, but some of the groupings are interesting. And there are a lot of countries bunched together, centered around about -4% of GDP on trade and 45% of GDP on public debt. The US is slightly up and to the left. I'll have to do one without so many minor countries countries.

Update: Removing some countries helped a bit. Japan is the most notable of the missing, but it was so far above the others that removing it really opened up the vertical spacing.

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