Tinker Bell
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Considering that all the major countries in Europe owe money, who do they owe it to? The US, Australia and other non EU countries are also heavily in hock.
By this I don't mean that Govts lend to Govts, as it doesn't work like that.
Those are very interesting stats but very difficult to interpret. Note that on the combination of merchandise (goods) and services we are well in the black. What puts us in the red are the large profit repatriations (reported as negative Income). Both could be very misleading due to transfer pricing by multinationals. The negative balance is more likely financed by multinationals repatriating accrued surpluses rather than actual borrowing from abroad.Example: we produce output/income of 150bn, but we as a nation spend 160bn.
So we must borrow 10 bn from abroad. This is known as a deficit on the Balance of Payments.
See here for data:
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