Visualised: the world’s biggest banks and the debts we owe them

Before leaving for the US, I worked on this visualisation with graphic artist Paul Scruton, a version of which has just been published in the latest issue of Wired UK magazine.

The data comes from a paper published in December by the Wharton School (PDF) in Pennsylvania which analyses bank debt in relation to each country’s GDP. In the weird old world of banking the money you owe to a bank counts as an asset for them

Market Watch wrote about this earlier this year, with Steve Goldstein pointing out that

A country can have big banks that aren’t bad, and, fact, well-run banks can boost a nation’s economy. At the same time, though, high levels of exposure present risks, as Cyprus and Ireland have discovered

The data behind this chart can be downloaded here. What can you do with it?