Where has all the money gone?

At the last published count, the US Treasury had debts of $14.7trn or, roughly, $42,000 per head of the population. This figure caused political deadlock in Congress last year when the Super-Committee failed to agree an extension to its own ceiling, which would have caused the US Treasury to default on its loans to investors. Not surprisingly the ceiling was eventually extended and the capitalist machine carried on. We heard recently that the UK has debts of £1trn and the rest of Europe has managed to accumulate €7trn of inter-government debt. When we consider that Japan still has con...