ABSTRACT
The Urban Institute, a nonprofit policy research and educational organization located in Washington, D.C., recently published an excellent volume entitled The New World Fiscal Order. 1 Its essays concentrate entirely on public debt, the rapidly rising public debt levels of recent years, and industrial democracies' declining ability to control federal budgets. My concern in this book is with debt in general, both public and private. To see the system whole, at least at first, let us see how each of the parts is interconnected and how best to measure their cumulative impact. Dauntingly complex, global debt is one of the cogs in the much larger process of global capitalism and can be understood fully only by combining its private and its public components.
