The answer is illustrated below:
Update: Actually, the answer is more accurately illustrated here - the U.S. Treasury has revised the data which was used to create the chart below!
The United States' total public debt outstanding was approximately $13.562 trillion at the end of the government's fiscal year on 30 September 2010. As of 4 January 2011, the United States' total public debt outstanding has surpassed 14 trillion dollars and is continuing to grow rapidly.
Despite that near half-trillion dollar increase, the percentage composition of who owns the U.S. national debt shown in the chart above is relatively unchanged. On the whole, U.S. individuals and institutions, when including the Social Security, U.S. Civil Service and Military trust funds own 62.2% of the U.S. national debt, while foreign nations own the remaining 37.8%.
Notes
"All Other Foreign Nations" are all those except China (for which we've included Hong Kong), Japan, United Kingdom, Brazil and "Oil Exporters."
"Oil exporters" include Ecuador, Venezuela, Indonesia, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Gabon, Libya, and Nigeria.
The "U.S. Civil Service Retirement Fund" fund is the Federal Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund. The "U.S. Military Retirement Fund" is the Department of Defense Retirement Fund. The "Social Security Trust Fund" is the Federal Old-Age Survivors and Disability Insurance Trust Fund.
Data sources:
U.S. Treasury Department. Monthly Statement of the Public Debt of the United States, September 30, 2010.
U.S. Treasury Department. Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Securities. (At end of September 2010).
Labels: data visualization, national debt
Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:
ironman at politicalcalculations
Thanks in advance!
Closing values for previous trading day.
This site is primarily powered by:
CSS Validation
RSS Site Feed
JavaScript
The tools on this site are built using JavaScript. If you would like to learn more, one of the best free resources on the web is available at W3Schools.com.
Other Cool Resources
Blog Roll
