"it's the debt, stupid"

"it's the debt, stupid"
.
"I suspect the GDP fetishism owes a lot to the models currently in use in the economics field, which focus exclusively on an economy’s income statement."
...
"More noteworthy for me is how the salt- and freshwater types completely disregard debt, an issue central to the Austrian and Minskyian schools of thought. Paul Krugman wrote 6,000 words focused only on the income statement. There was no mention of the huge rise in debt in the U.S. and other economies like the U.K., Spain, Ireland, Iceland or Latvia.

All of these countries have one common feature: asset price booms underpinned by rising debt levels. Let’s hope we start seeing more discussion about the balance sheet in future."