One reason I read Zero Hedge is for the writing style and today the following introduction to an article on the BIS report on sovereign debt projections is a damned good example (emphasis mine) :

It’s one thing to hear fringe bloggers raving breathlessly against the collision course that the US economy is on. It is something else to see the Bank of International Settlements call for the baseline projection for US debt/GDP to hit over 400% by 2040. And this excludes the bankrupt GSEs, bankrupt Social Security, and the soon to be bankrupt Medicare. In a must read report, the BIS (of the central bankers’ central bank) provides the much needed segue to the work of Reinhart and Rogoff, and in not so many words confirms that the entire developed world is now bankrupt on a discounted basis. With Debt/GDP ratios for virtually everyone expected to jump to over 400% in the bank’s baseline scenario, it is no surprise why the Dow may well hit 1 quadrillion on nothing but Weimar and Zimbabwean ponzification, before it crashes instantaneously to zero. We exaggerate about the quadrillion, we do not exaggerate about the sovereign default. The current and previous administrations have doomed this country, just as all other administrations of the developed world have done the same, in order to bail out the banking system, in the greatest fatally flawed private-public risk transfer experiment ever attempted. Those who will walk out of it with virtually infinite wealth are about 0.1% of the US population (the same people who tell you now that all is well, and that their bonuses are fully justified). Those who won’t, and will end up doing bad things to the aforementioned cohort, is everyone else. And the “everyone else” is getting angrier by the day, as they realize just how massive the wealth transfer scam truly is… if only they could tear themselves away from the iCrap, watching Tiger Woods’ nonsensical Nike ads, or glower in schadenfreude as Simon Cowell rips another wanna be singer from head to toe.

There is quite an interesting graph from the report (included below) which shows Public Debt to GDP projections for OECD countries. The UK has the second worst projections  for all three outcomes – Japan holds the top spot but they are already on the path to ruin.

Overall, an excellent article and well worth reading.