Arthur Kroeber

Yeah.

I would respectfully disagree with Victor on that.

I mean, it's impossible to know for sure.

And the problem is that

You have the problem of formal debt, which is debt issued by government entities.

And then you have contingent debt, which is debt issued by corporations that may or may not essentially be fronts or windows for local governments, right?

There is also a very significant problem of

double counting, which is hard to resolve, where debt gets counted at different levels in the system.

It's one piece of debt, but depending on how long the chain is, it gets counted in various different places.

And I've long had the view that many of these much larger estimates of debt don't fully account for the double counting problem.

So, I think it's quite possible that the true debt level is higher than what we think it is.

It's unlikely, in my opinion, to be as high as Victor says it is.

And it also matters what the debt goes to and who is actually formally responsible for paying it.

And are there like project flows or income flows that can be used to pay for it?

So the servicing, just what the structure of the servicing of the debt matters, right?

At the end of the day, we do have a pretty good sense from the macro data of how much total debt there is in the economy.

It's on the order of 300% of GDP.

So if you want to say that government debt is 200% of GDP,

Interesting.

Unless you're double counting, you're basically saying that everything else is a lot less than we think it is.