[Doly]

I have a questions for the experts on this forum. I just had a look at the CIA world factbook:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publication ... os/xx.html

It gives the following figures:

GDP: $46.77 trillion (2006 est.)
Debt - external: $43.42 trillion
note: this figure is the sum total of all countries' external debt, both public and private (2004 est.)
Market value of publicly traded shares: $43.64 trillion (2005)

I can't help noticing that all these numbers are very close. What does this mean? I can't see why they should be. Are they always supposed to be close or does this tell us something about the world economy lately?

[LoneSnark]

It is one hell of a coincidence. But a coincidence is all it is. Many countries have debts far in excess of their GDP, and there is no logical reason you cannot owe more money than you earn in a year (see anyone with a mortgage), so there is no reason world-debt cannot exceed GDP.

Similarly, there is no reason debt cannot be zero, except that doing so would allocate insufficient resources to productive capacity.

Finally, the value of publicly traded shares is the present value of the portion of the economy controled by publicly trade companies. If there were no publicly traded companies (all private) this value would be zero. Similarly, if there were no privately held company (all public) this value would be far in excess of world GDP.

So, it is one heck of a coincidence that all three figures are similar. But a coincidence is all it can be.