The day the United States reached a deal to end the government shutdown and avoid a possible default, we took a look at the debt by country all over the world. It is widely known that the United States holds a difficult-to-fathom amount of debt. In fact, the nearly 17 Trillion dollars represents the largest external debt in the world. The UK is ranked in all three graphs, each quite high too, this is why maybe the UK has a lot of microloan deals, logbook loans that end up with the loaner claiming a bill of sale against the car, and a lot of families and citizens in debt.

But how does that $17 Trillion compare to the US’ GDP (Gross Domestic Product)? This may be a fairer way to compare debt between countries because it provides some insight into each country’s ability to cover their debts. The United States’ debt as a share of their GDP is 106%. This may surprise many of you (it did us), but this puts the United States all the way down at 30^th worldwide in this measure.

Finally, we were curious to know what the debt would be per capita. In other words, how much debt is represented by each citizen? In the case of the United States, the $52,170 debt per capita ranked 17^th around the world.

All numbers used in this infographic are from this list of countries by external debt, which compiled the numbers from several sources. The United States numbers mentioned above were current as of July 2013.