In the wake of today’s stock-market-crash-cum-partial-recovery, here’s a diagram¹ documenting the loans that a few of Europe’s weaker economies owe to each other. Figures are in billions of dollars. Click for a larger view.

While there seems to be plenty to criticize about the fiscal policy of the Eurozone, it’s worth noting that America’s national debt is at $12.31 trillion (as of Q4 2009). For the infographically-minded, if we were to extrapolate from the size of the European debt circles then attempting to represent the US debt would exceed the size of the diagram.

¹ Diagram blatantly stolen from the NYT.

The whole article’s good, but I especially love this point:

… economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth… the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

Pointedly ignoring the differences between a beautifully abstract model and the messy underlying reality that it (supposedly) represents? Well I’ve certainly never been guilty of that particular intellectual sin.

This is something I’ve dreamed about for years. I never thought it would actually exist.