Corrections

2026-09-14-v1 — a replaced research cohort

September 14, 2026

This edition replaces 2026-09-13-v1 wholesale rather than correcting individual claims in it. The two are not reconcilable line by line: they draw on different observation dates, different country selections and, for governments, a different accounting perimeter. The earlier edition remains on record as the provenance of what was published before it.

• The household cohort is now seven economies — India, Mexico, Germany, the Republic of Korea, the United States, Australia and Switzerland. Brazil and Japan are not part of it and have no replacement claim.
• Government debt moves from a BIS general-government credit series to Eurostat's consolidated gross Maastricht debt at face value for Q4 2025, published in euro and converted to dollars exactly once at the December 31, 2025 reference rate. The differently scoped BIS series is retired, not restated.
• The corporate examples are now Boeing, AT&T and Verizon at June 30, 2026, plus Boeing at December 31, 2020 as a dated historical snapshot.
• Amounts that are not debt balances are recorded as what they are: a fiscal year of federal interest is marked a money flow and can never be summed into any total, a farm figure carries its forecast vintage, and a medical estimate keeps its "at least".
• A display defect is fixed: populations were being printed with a dollar sign. Units now decide how a figure is rendered, and the data build fails if a non-dollar record is ever declared renderable as currency.

Retired identifiers that public links already pointed at are kept as aliases where the replacement is the same publisher series. Where a claim simply no longer exists, its old link is allowed to go dead rather than quietly resolve to a different measure.

The tour was re-cut to match

September 14, 2026

The route ran 25 scenes and now runs 28: ten retired, eleven new, and one old scene split into three, which adds two more. A scene was retired whenever the claim underneath it stopped existing; none was kept alive by pointing it at a different claim of a similar size.

• Added, eleven. The Republic of Korea; a billion dollars as its own unit; Estonia's, Ireland's, Germany's and France's governments, all four on the Eurostat measure; Verizon; U.S. student loans and mortgages; the published U.S. household total; and U.S. federal debt as an explicit change of borrower.
• Split, one into three. The global finale was one scene carrying public debt, private nonfinancial debt and the combined total as three steps. It is now three scenes, so each measure gets its own arrival and the total gets stillness.
• Retired, ten. Brazil, Japan, Ford, Apple, and the six government scenes built on the BIS general-government series — Denmark, Switzerland, Germany and Italy together, Japan, China and the United States. Their links no longer resolve. The four Eurostat government scenes listed above are not their replacements: that is a different perimeter, and nothing here is presented as a continuation.
• Every scene now carries the specification's own scene number alongside its link, and both are listed in the methodology.

2026-09-13-v1 — first edition

The first published edition. No corrections were issued against it before it was superseded.