> I assume that a "Total" should refer to the sum of some set of
> numbers, but I can't make *any* of the numbers below add up to even an
> approximation of the numbers in the "Total" column. Please explain a
> little bit. Are all of them absolute figures or are some of them
> percentages? What, for example, does the 57.9 billion in the first row
> refer to: China's total foreign debt?
Apologies to LBOers, there was a typo in the original: total loans to Hong Kong should have been 222.3, not 22.3 (skipped a number there). As for the way the chart works -- the debtors are at the far left column (China, Hong Kong, etc. to Thailand) and the creditors are the top horizontal line. The first number in each column is the total amount of loans originating from BIS-reporting banks (that's the Bank for International Settlements, a Swiss-based group which issues suggested guidelines for things like accounting procedures & reserve requirements; the big banks are generally BIS members) loaned to the debtor country in question. Then when you move rightwards from that number, you get the totals owed to French banks, German banks and so forth. So China, for example, owes $57.9 billion in loans. Japan is listed as owning $18.7 billion of that debt; French banks own $7.3 billion, etc. Moving down, Japanese banks loaned out $87.4 billion to Hong Kong, $23.2 billion to Indonesia etc.
Note that the EU is the sum of France, Germany, the UK and other Eurobanks (primarily the Swiss and Dutch); also, note the total of Japan+EU+USA is less than the total owed by each country, mostly because there were other loans from, say, Australian or local Asian banks who are BIS members, but aren't listed here.
The corrected version of the chart should read (with a * at the end of each data line):
Country Total Japan France Germany UK EU USA * China 57.9 18.7 7.3 7.3 6.9 28.1 2.9 * Hong Kong 222.3 87.4 12.8 32.2 30.1 99.5 8.8 * Indonesia 58.7 23.2 4.8 5.6 4.3 22.5 4.6 * Malaysia 28.8 10.5 2.9 5.7 2 12.7 2.4 * Philippines 14.1 2.1 1.7 2 1.1 6.8 2.8 * Singapore 211.2 65 15.4 38.4 25.2 113.3 5.2 * South Korea 103.4 23.7 10.1 10.8 6.1 36.3 10 * Taiwan 25.2 3 5.2 3 3.2 14.4 2.5 * Thailand 69.4 37.7 5.1 7.6 2.8 19.8 4 *
(source: Bank of International Settlements)
The true, corrected figures for ownership of that juicy $791 billion debt owed by Southeast Asia to the banks in question are as follows: Japan has 34.3% of it, France has 8.3%, Germany has 14.2%, UK has 10.3%, all European banks combined have 44.7% and the USA has only 5.5% of the total.
Sorry 'bout the faulty number-crunch. The conclusion, namely that Taiwan and Korea are, in terms of loan finance anyway, firmly within the orbit of the Japan/EU and no longer the wards of US creditors, still seems to hold, though.
-- Dennis