Whilst simultaneously having a rapidly declining birth rate, and relatively low levels of immigration, to maintain a homogeneous society, without imploding in on itself?
In: Economics
It’s a great question with a really simple answer. They can’t run out of money. Furthermore, they control the interest rate, which they can, and do, often have sitting at about 0%.
It goes a lot deeper as well, the debt itself is basically just printed Yen in savings form, and not “debt” like a credit card. But we’ll put that aside. Their government with their central bank fully controls how much money they print by way of spending new money into the economy, and the interest rate on their bonds.
Now, separately from their money is their real economy, aka how much they produce. Their aging population with a low birthrate may outpace acquiring the new tech to make the fewer and increasingly burdened remaining young workers too slow to stop economic shrinkage. We have yet to see if that spirals into collapse or if it just readjusts downward. But it won’t be because of their public debt.
And that same risk is showing up worldwide regardless of debt.
Now for countries whose debt is in other countries’ currencies, yeah if their economy starts shrinking and they can’t make payments, they will have both problems like you imagine from your question.
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