I recently read this list in The Guardian. What it does, is alphabetically trickle down the list of members in the G20 and list their national debts at the point of 2008-11-15; the G20 is a group that consists of 19 of the world's 25 largest national economies, plus the European Union (EU).

In the current throes of recession, I find the article highly interesting as it not only goes to show how much money every individual country owes as their national debt, but also tells whether every individual debt is OK or not. Even though you and I may have issues with the way that The Guardian has delivered said list, they've included a "desperation rating". For instance, while India may have a debt of 6.37 trillion US dollars, they're experiencing a huge economical growth and hence end up with a desperation rating of 1/5, while the USA, at 8.4 trillion US dollars of national debt, being the origin of this subprime crisis, end up with a desperation rating of 5/5.

I decided to show this easily through graphs made in Excel. Here are the nations stacked up, showing their individual national debts:

And here's a graph of the desperation ratings:

All in all, having a huge economy doesn't mean you're well off, or saying that you've got a relatively small national debt means you're safe from the recession. But what this does mean, is that I think Obama has to become God in order to have power to be able to save the US from economically tough times ahead, during his lifetime.

If you want the raw data with graphs stuck in, here's an Excel 2007 file and here's one for Excel 97-2003.