And you've got to ask the question how far in debt do you want to go?
Based on this measure, countries can be grouped into categories depending on how far their debt is from their upper threshold: safe (green), caution (yellow), significant risk (amber) and grave risk (red).
He's very concerned about student loans and can't believe how far in debt his son is, despite having a good job in IT. "The election sucks... Our country is going to hell in a handbasket".
How far the sovereign debt crisis might spiral, and its precise ramifications, are unknowable, but some fault lines are evident.
A rule of thumb for spotting future disaster is how far those weaknesses a debt surge, ill-understood interconnections and uncertainty about a safety net are repeated.The overhaul of financial regulation since 2008 has made most progress on the first two.
Typically a roundup of measures to raise money for the public coffers by adding a few pennies on cigarette and booze tax, the announcement will be a very different affair, heavy with expectations about how far deeply into debt it will push the country.
As negotiations go down to the wire, the leadership of the two parties are tussling over two main elements of a deal – how far to push back the debt ceiling and how to deal with spending cuts designed to close the budget deficit.
By mid-2009 financialeveragege in most countries had fallen to around its average in the 15 years before the crisis.To pinpoint where more squeezing is likely, the study examined how far the level and growth of debt in different sectors were out of line with other countries and with historical averages.
I insist no", was the response of Spain's finance minister to the prospect of a bigger Greek write-down.How deeply Greece's private debt is restructured will ultimately depend on how far the Germans push and how much the European Central Bank (ECB), which has long opposed any debt write-down, resists.
