How we counted
The date and definition belong beside the amount. Otherwise two neat piles can make a bad comparison.
These are selected examples, not a ranking of who can afford to repay.
For each country, we divide end-2025 credit to households and the nonprofits grouped with them by the World Bank's midyear resident-population estimate. Children and people without recorded borrowing are included.
The result is an approximate mean per resident. A borrower-only average, median, citizenship-based measure, or affordability comparison would answer a different question. The source credit series is already in U.S. dollars; we use it without another conversion.
The cards are already in the household total. Showing them earlier doesn't make another set. The New York Fed's six categories fit together once.
The IMF's public and private nonfinancial sectors form the world total the same way, within their own dataset.
Use the date beside the figure, not the date on your device. Forecasts also name their release, because the outlook can change. The AI sources describe plans and financing, and they haven't supplied an ending.
New research can change a later edition. Your saved game's target stays put.
Dollars, dollars per resident, index points, percentages, and annual spending do not describe the same thing. A bubble's falling price is not a payment toward debt.
European government figures retain their original euro values in the sources and are converted once using the adopted year-end rate. Historical cameo amounts keep their own dates and denominations. No inflation or purchasing-power adjustment is implied.
A hundred times the money needs a square ten times as wide. We're measuring area.
Small tiles become bundles as the view gets wider. The legend shows what a tile is worth now. Measure by the paper field. The people and the furniture are there for company.
When the reference gets too small to see, the locator shows it up close, with a label.
The calculations use source values before rounding. Extra decimal places from division aren't extra evidence.
"At least" stays beside a lower bound. Forecasts keep their date and label. Their dashed edges don't show a probability range.
Earth Yard Sale uses a dated debt figure as the size of its fictional goal. The business, repayments, alien promise, and delivery are invented.
The gold and platinum have a fixed value inside that fiction. We don't calculate their weight from market prices or model how selling them would affect those prices. The game's settlement leaves the documentary's research unchanged.
This edition doesn't establish an all-time debt champion, comparable current borrowing for OpenAI and Anthropic, or a world total that includes the financial sector.
A large valuation or spending plan can't stand in for missing debt records, and a missing record is not a zero.
A correction says what changed and why, with its source and affected scenes. Reopening a link doesn't make its publication date newer.
Changes for this edition are listed below. An empty list means none have been recorded.
Scene identifiers
The specification numbers the tour's scenes S01–S28. This site addresses each one by a slug instead, because a slug is what a link and a saved reading position can carry. Both identities point at the same scene; the table below is generated from the compiled route, so it cannot disagree with the page.
| Scene | Link | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
S01 | #one-dollar | Example |
S02 | #more-paper | Example |
S03 | #india | India: recorded household credit per resident |
S04 | #mexico | Mexico: recorded household credit per resident |
S05 | #germany | Germany: recorded household credit per resident |
S06 | #korea | Republic of Korea: recorded household credit per resident |
S07 | #united-states | United States: recorded household credit per resident |
S08 | #australia | Australia: recorded household credit per resident |
S09 | #switzerland | Switzerland: recorded household credit per resident |
S10 | #copies | Example · multiplication exercise |
S11 | #room-for-a-billion | Example · a new unit |
S12 | #estonia | Estonia: general-government debt |
S13 | #boeing | Boeing: total debt |
S14 | #att | AT&T: total debt |
S15 | #verizon | Verizon: total debt |
S16 | #ireland | Ireland: general-government debt |
S17 | #cards | U.S. credit-card balances |
S18 | #student-loans | U.S. student-loan balances |
S19 | #germany-government | Germany: general-government debt |
S20 | #france-government | France: general-government debt |
S21 | #mortgages | U.S. mortgage balances |
S22 | #us-household-total | U.S. household debt total |
S23 | #us-federal-debt | U.S. federal debt |
S24 | #world-public | Global public debt |
S25 | #world-private | Global private nonfinancial debt |
S26 | #world | Global public and private nonfinancial debt |
S27 | #other-side | Global public and private nonfinancial debt |
S28 | #alien | Fictional epilogue |
Ten scenes from the previous edition have no entry here. Each one measured a claim this edition does not carry, and none of them was pointed at a different claim of a similar size — a scene about a BIS general-government series does not become a scene about a Eurostat one because the country name matches.
#brazil— Household cohort reduced to seven economies; no replacement claim.#japan— Household cohort reduced to seven economies; no replacement claim.#ford— Corporate examples replaced; no Ford claim in this edition.#apple— Corporate examples replaced; no Apple claim in this edition.#denmark— BIS general-government series retired; Denmark is not in the Eurostat cohort.#swiss-government— BIS general-government series retired.#germany-italy— BIS general-government series retired; Germany returns at S19 on the Eurostat measure.#japanese-government— BIS general-government series retired.#chinese-government— BIS general-government series retired.#us-government— BIS general-government series retired; S23 measures federal gross debt, a different perimeter.
Links and data
To share one scene, use /s/ and its slug — /s/att/ for AT&T. That address shows the scene's own figure, measure and date in a link preview, then opens the tour at the scene. Share, beside each recorded figure in the tour, copies that address, or a one-line citation with the amount, measure, date and sources.
Every recorded figure is also available as a table, built from the same data as this site: CSV or JSON, edition 2026-09-14-v1. The figures belong to their publishers; the labels and definitions are CC BY 4.0.