The Economist has a debt clock that shows the current global public debt, a number that keeps going up and up. It also has tools that let you see side-by-side comparisons of countries’ debt.
The clock is ticking. Every second, it seems, someone in the world takes on more debt. The idea of a debt clock for an individual nation is familiar to anyone who has been to Times Square in New York, where the American public shortfall is revealed. Our clock (updated September 2012) shows the global figure for almost all government debts in dollar terms.
The numbers are staggering. However, viewing the debt as dollars per-capita is slightly less troubling than just seeing the total numbers for each country and total numbers for the world.