Contrasting national debt movements during the last two decades

Tom Clougherty has an interesting graph up at the ASI blog, taken from this McKinsey report, of the movement in combined public and private debt for the ten biggest of the world's developed national economies, from 1990 until now. Follow either of the above two links to get a bigger and more legible version of this graph:

Since 2007, of course, all have lurched upwards from wherever they were to quite a bit more.

To me the interesting bits are those between 1990 and 2007. The general trend was a general increase in debt, from somewhat troubling to somewhat more troubling. But three countries bucked this trend: Japan started very bad and merely stayed very bad; Canada started okay-ish and stayed okay-ish; Britain started okay-ish but became very bad. In terms of the direction things went in, Canada has the best graph of them all, and Britain has the worst. Between them, these three graphs, the grey one along the top (Japan), the green one in the pack towards the bottom (Canada), and the dark one moving most determinedly upwards (Britain), make a kind of big and elongated Z.

One other deviation from the norm worth noting is that just before 2007, Germany, unlike any other country, went (see the yellow graph) definitely downwards. It did what Keynes said, in other words, and paid down its debts when times were good, or at least when they seemed good. In Britain, the "Keynesians", public and private, just carried on running up more debt.

I know that as a fan of Austrianism I am not supposed to get too excited about national economic aggregates. But this set of aggregates and aggregate movements looks to me quite telling. Make of it all what you will. For me, it confirms the sense that many now have that Tony Blair's government was one of the worse ones that we've ever had.