The debt of nations

Analyst Pavel Kohout told Karel Šíp on Fri. that he has a theory that really big crises generally occur when there's too much money, not too little. Such as when a government has a lot of money in the short run and thinks it can overspend, or when banks lend excessively. Which got us thinking about where all the borrowed money disappears to. It's easy for officials to identify who owes the money that has been borrowed by Czech households, which amounts to about Kč 1.1 trillion. It's also easy to identify which Czech companies owe the Kč 950bn in corporate debt. But what about the national debt of Kč 1.5tr? Who "owes" this? Well, all Czechs, of course. It has gone into roads, schools, etc., and into the pockets of employees, pensioners and the poor. But a disproportionate amount has also gone into the pockets of the owners of all those companies that won overpriced government contracts. Their fortunes are built to a large degree not on the wealth of the nation, but on the debt of the nation, and most of them don't even realize it.