No UK debt crisis, part 89

Via Stephanie Flanders: an IMF report [PDF] has looked at how much governments are relying on the bond markets to fund their borrowing. The chart shows the overall gross financing needs of various developed countries’ governments. This includes both the new borrowing (the deficit) and the renewal of old borrowing, which depends on how much national debt there already is and on how long-dated the country’s bonds are.


On both of those counts, the UK does pretty well, so despite our large deficit we’re actually less dependent on the goodwill of the bond markets.

(I don’t know why these countries and not others were included. Germany in particular would have been good to compare. The best information I have is a Fitch analysis earlier in the year, suggesting that it would need to raise 38% more debt than the UK in 2010, in cash terms. Yes, the German economy is bigger than the UK’s, but not that much so.)