"Yes, the numbers are big, but the ratios place China as a mid range debtor nation."
i thought that that too, until I read the following paragraph in the same article.
The FT’s Jamil Anderlini points out here that the figure is very high for an emerging economy. Mature economies can handle a higher debt ratio for all kinds of reasons, not least because they have large assets to offset their liabilities. British figures of household debt look much more threatening than they really are because the debt is mostly for mortgages, and is balanced by high levels of equity and wealth.
And this to finish the article:
"As the BIS implied in its annual report: almost the entire world has now been drawn into the Ponzi scheme of unsustainable debt. We can inflate some of it away, or we can deflate into defaults and creditor haircuts. Pick your poison."
what will it do for gold? I suspect what the 2007-2011 crisis did for gold...
