Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

According to this recent report, the total global debt (debts owed by governments, financial and non-financial corporations Non-financial corporations All economic agents that produce non-financial goods and services. They represent the greatest share of productive activity. and households) increased by more than $15,000 billion by 2023. Around 55% of this increase came from the so-called ’mature’ markets, mainly the United States, France and Germany. In emerging markets, debt accumulation concentrated mainly in China, India and Brazil. In total, the mature markets accumulated $208,300 billion of debt, $103,700 billion more than the emerging markets, which reached $104,600 billion.

Governments experienced the most significant increase, followed by non-financial corporations. Of the total global debt recorded in the fourth quarter of 2023, some $94.4 trillion was held by non-financial corporations, $89.9 trillion by governments, $69.4 trillion by the financial sector and $59.3 trillion by households.

The total global debt increased by more than $15 trillion in 2023. About 55% of this increase is recorded in mature markets, mainly the US, France and Germany

The Global Debt Monitor dated December of the pandemic year 2020 already warned against an “attack of the debt tsunami.” At the time the global debt amounted to €233 trillion and we wondered whether there were breakwaters strong enough in front of such a tsunami [2]

The OECD OECD
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD: the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, created in 1960. It includes the major industrialized countries and has 34 members as of January 2016.

http://www.oecd.org/about/membersandpartners/ also recently published its Global Debt Report 2024: Bond Bond A bond is a stake in a debt issued by a company or governmental body. The holder of the bond, the creditor, is entitled to interest and reimbursement of the principal. If the company is listed, the holder can also sell the bond on a stock-exchange. Markets in a High-Debt Environment [3]. It estimates that the overall debt-to-GDP GDP
Gross Domestic Product Gross Domestic Product is an aggregate measure of total production within a given territory equal to the sum of the gross values added. The measure is notoriously incomplete; for example it does not take into account any activity that does not enter into a commercial exchange. The GDP takes into account both the production of goods and the production of services. Economic growth is defined as the variation of the GDP from one period to another. ratio in the OECD will rise slightly this year. It also forecasts an increase of more than one percentage point in nine countries, led by the United States, where it is expected to rise by three percentage points. On the other hand, the debt/GDP ratio in 12 countries is expected to fall by more than one percentage point, most notably in Japan, Portugal and Spain, where it is forecast to fall by more than five percentage points.

Moreover, the OECD Global Debt Report 2024 shows that the debt/GDP ratio in 2023 exceeded pre-pandemic levels by around five percentage points on average, and by ten percentage points in the OECD area as a whole. It also indicates that this ratio is higher in 24 countries and that it has increased by more than eight percentage points in all G7 countries. It also notes that the debt-to-GDP ratios of Japan and the United States have increased by more than 24 and 22 percentage points respectively since 2019. Over the same period, debt-to-GDP ratios have fallen in 14 countries, dropping by more than ten percentage points in Ireland, Poland, Portugal and Sweden. Finally, it points out that debt/GDP ratios and their evolution vary a lot according to the different methods of debt evaluation.

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, warns against his country’s public debt: “in America, the situation is more urgent than I can ever remember.”

BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, warns against the debt issue in the US in his outrageous annual letter to investors [4] in which he questions retirement at 65 (more than half of BlackRock’s $10 trillion assets are for retirement); uses “energy pragmatism” to justify its abandonment of the hypocritical term ESG (socially responsible investment), in the face of Republican disinvestment (BlackRock has invested over $300 billion in traditional energy companies and $138 billion in energy transition strategies); and extols the benefits of capitalism to... lift people out of poverty!

Under the subtitle “Debt Matters,” the CEO of the world’s largest fund manager and global whistleblower warns about public debt in his country: “in America, the situation is more urgent than I can ever remember.” He adds that “since the start of the pandemic, the U.S. has issued roughly $11.1 trillion of new debt, and the amount is only part of the issue. There’s also the interest Interest An amount paid in remuneration of an investment or received by a lender. Interest is calculated on the amount of the capital invested or borrowed, the duration of the operation and the rate that has been set. rate the Treasury needs to pay on it.” He muses, “Should the current rates hold, it amounts to an extra trillion dollars in interest payments over the next decade.”

“Why is this debt a problem now? Because, historically, America has paid for old debt by issuing new debt in the form of Treasury securities. It’s a workable strategy so long as people want to buy those securities — but going forward, the U.S. cannot take for granted that investors will want to buy them in such volume or at the premium they currently do. Today, around 30% of U.S. Treasury securities are held by foreign governments or investors. That percentage will likely go down as more countries build their own capital markets and invest domestically,” he answers.

What Larry Fink does not say in his letter is that the interests he stands for have not only contributed to crises, but directly benefit from the conversion of private debt into public debt, resulting in the latter spiraling upward

According to BlackRock’s CEO, “a bad scenario” could lead American economy to look “like Japan’s in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when debt exceeded GDP and led to periods of austerity and stagnation.” The answer suggested by the master of global stockmarkets, rather than fiscal discipline (raising taxes and cutting spending), is an average growth of 3% in real terms by “tapping the capital markets to build one of the best catalysts for growth: Infrastructure.” And especially energy infrastructure.

What Larry Fink does not say in his letter is that the interests he stands for have not only contributed to crises, but directly benefit from the conversion of private debt into public debt, resulting in the latter spiraling upward. We should keep in mind that in 2020, a year marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve FED
Federal Reserve Officially, Federal Reserve System, is the United States’ central bank created in 1913 by the ’Federal Reserve Act’, also called the ’Owen-Glass Act’, after a series of banking crises, particularly the ’Bank Panic’ of 1907.

FED – decentralized central bank : http://www.federalreserve.gov/ (Fed) had called on a division of BlackRock (Financial Markets Advisory) to manage billions of dollars of purchases of bonds and mortgage Mortgage A loan made against property collateral. There are two sorts of mortgages:
1) the most common form where the property that the loan is used to purchase is used as the collateral;
2) a broader use of property to guarantee any loan: it is sufficient that the borrower possesses and engages the property as collateral. -backed assets, as an additional measure to supposedly cushion the economic and financial impact of the coronavirus. During the previous financial crisis in 2008, BlackRock was also hired to manage the assets of Bear Stearns and American International Group (AIG). In both cases, there was no formal invitation to tender, which led to widespread criticism.

José Ignacio Goirigolzarri is currently at the head of CaixaBank (formerly Bankia), a boosted financial entity also owned by BlackRock. CaixaBank is the main beneficiary of public money bailing out Spanish banks, to the amount of some €100,000 million, a mortgage that has not been repaid and that contributed to the soaring Spanish public debt, both in 2012, the year of the bailout, and in 2020, when the debt of almost €35,000 million of the bad bank or SAREB surfaced (see the AIREF graph for the vertical increase in Spanish public debt to 125.3% of GDP in 2020) [5]. Now, with galling impudence and impunity, in no way bothered by national and international supervisors, this same bank shamelessly dares to put public pressure on the government to reduce the country’s public debt.