In fiscal year 2020, net outlays for interest totaled $345 billion, equal to 1.6 percent of GDP and 5.3 percent of total federal spending.

The interest on this debt is paid to individuals, businesses, pension and mutual funds, state and local governments, and foreign entities. Debt held by the public at the end of the 2019 fiscal year was $16.8 trillion – about 40% of this debt is held by foreign creditors.

Borrowing to pay for current consumption brings interest payments, and ultimately, the need to pay off principal balances. These annual deficits accumulate and contribute to increased government debt. The most common measure of government debt is total debt minus financial assets held by governments like cash.

For a long time, the biggest holder of U.S. debt was China. But did you know that in late 2016, Japan overtook China as the biggest foreign holder of U.S. debt? Japan and China are, by far, the two biggest holders of U.S. debt – but the top five is filled with countries that you might not expect.

The public holds over $21 trillion, or almost 78%, of the national debt. 1 Foreign governments hold about a third of the public debt, while the rest is owned by U.S. banks and investors, the Federal Reserve, state and local governments, mutual funds, and pensions funds, insurance companies, and savings bonds.

Russia’s

So why can’t governments just print money in normal times to pay for their policies? The short answer is inflation. Historically, when countries have simply printed money it leads to periods of rising prices — there’s too many resources chasing too few goods.

In other words, countries worldwide owed more than 6% of world GDP in debt to China as of 2017.

Foreign investors hold roughly 40% of the US’ debt

In 2019, the national debt of Russia amounted to around 201.21 billion U.S. dollars.

So basically, they have little debt because they’ve had little time to build it up. There’s also the factor that as a new and potentially unstable entity, there would have been a reluctance with many to lend Russia money.

In the second quarter of 2020, the national debt in Russia amounted to approximately 154.4 billion U.S. dollars. Over the observed period, the highest figure was observed from July to September 2019 at over 164.1 billion U.S. dollars, after which it saw a gradual decline each quarter.

United States