How does a bean counter aggregate that value?
Not with the current accounting tools because foreign ownership of equity, foreign operations of corporations and corporate debt is entirely mixed by the time it is aggregated. The only way to get the total is to maintain the decomposition between equity, income debt within the compact entities they are aggregated. The BEA does not do that, and doing so requires Ito's calculus, or a continuing Bkack-Sholes decomposition.
The next best thing is to look at relative government debt across countries and use a coefficient to expand that. Governments are entirely owned by the national citizens, as best we can determine. But in places like Europe, even that measure is a bit difficult.
So, then what is our government external net debt position balanced against? Deferred taxes. After netting out other factors, that is government balancing asset. Those deferred taxes will come from the sale of goods to foreign debt holders.
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