Corporate Debt:
Here is a chart of corporate non-financial debt to GDP for China, US, Japan, etc. I have not verified the data but the chart is by a well known macro strategy data provider and I’m confident it is reliable. I don’t know if it includes commercial paper.
You can see China’s non-fin corp debt to GDP is about 160%. The US non-fin corp debt to GDP is about 82%.
Again, this is *corporate non-financial* debt, which means debt owed by companies that are not banks or other financial institutions.
Financial company debt is tracked separately, because for a bank, the debt it owes is balanced with the credit it extends, which is in turn debt of non-financial companies, so if you did include banks then you willl be double-counting debt.
China has a big debt problem, the biggest in the world right now. Note also that almost all of China’s debt is held domestically, very little by foreigners. So almost all of this debt is owed to Chinese creditors.
Wait, some will say, everyone knows the US has the biggest debt problem in the world! What about household debt, what about government debt, what about entitlements?
Household Debt:
China’s household debt is 61% of GDP. US household debt is 80% of GDP.
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/households-debt-to-gdp
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/households-debt-to-gdp
Government Debt:
Governments borrow via bonds rather than bank loans, so government debt means government bonds, referred to below as “SSA” (sovereign, state and agency).
https://www.icmagroup.org/Regulatory-Policy-and-Market-Practice/Secondary-Markets/bond-market-size/
As you can see, China’s SSA debt at $20TR is pretty close to US SSA debt at $22-23TR. But China GDP is about $15TR vs US GDP about $21TR.
So that’s China government debt to GDP of 133%, US government debt to GDP of 107%.
Entitlements
Entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, etc are, to a considerable extent, things the government will have to pay for, whether they are labeled “entitlements” or not. If there were no Social Security, could the US govt simply let tens of millions of elderly people starve on the streets or die outside hospital doors? It wouldn’t be called “Social Security” but there would be a huge slug of government spending directed their way regardless.
The same applies to China. The government will have to spend to support the population of elderly and ill, who don’t have private means, regardless of whether there is a named entitlement program today or not. I don’t know the present value of that future obligation as a percent of China’s GDP, and it is probably lower than the present value of future SSI/Medicare/etc as a present of US GDP, but I doubt it is vastly lower. The average SSI check is pretty modest.
So, that’s some numbers on the debt side to think about. Not suggesting the US debt load isn’t heavy but China’s debt load is much heavier.
We should look at assets and income too.