“Big difference - Japan’s debt is held by the Japanese. Our debt is largely held by foreigners.”
Only 28% of our debt is held by foreigners and that’s only using our public debt. If you look at our total debt that drops to under 20%.
Not only do foreigners only own a small percentage of our debt, everybody conveniently forgets to account for just how much our private entities own of other countries debt and other assets. We still own the world by a large margin. Chinese doesn’t have significant non governmental assets like we do. Most of our wealth is held by individuals and we own a ton of stuff.