World Debt Clock

I stumbled on this last night going through my RSS feeds:

The global debt clock
Our interactive overview of government debt across the planet

The clock is ticking. Every second, it seems, someone in the world takes on more debt. The idea of a debt clock for an individual nation is familiar to anyone who has been to Times Square in New York, where the American public shortfall is revealed. Our clock (updated September 2012) shows the global figure for almost all government debts in dollar terms.

Follow the link to view – it’s not just a clock, there’s also an interactive heat map, where you track public debt by totals, as ratios or in terms of growth; from 2001 to EIU forecast data for this year and next. Hovering your mouse over the map on a country prompts a tooltip that shows public debt data for that country in that particular year. There’s even a country comparison tool.

It’s nice toy to play with, if you’ve an interest in public debt, and cross-country comparisons generally