The latest episode of Didactic Mind is up and ready, in which I talk about the nature of the Deep State and how to deal with it:

I do need to issue one important correction. In my podcast I stated that China’s debt-to-GDP ratio is actually closer to 300%, but my wording was not precise and it would be easy to think that I was talking about government debt, because I compared this number with outstanding American government debt to GDP.

This comparison is wrong.

It is true that China’s TOTAL debt – public, private, household, corporate, and so on – is 300% of its GDP. By this measure, however, the USA’s TOTAL debt load is, at this point, in excess of 2000% of GDP.

A proper apples-to-apples comparison of China’s government debt to America’s government debt will show that China’s public debt-to-GDP ratio is about 55%, while America’s is about 130%.

The points that I made about China’s bad debt problem, on the other hand, are accurate. And I do not for one moment believe that China could simply bail out its bad debts without any consequences.