And don’t forget that ever-increasing debt is baked into their system as a whole—households/people simply don’t have enough money to buy everything the country makes (consumption is just 38% of gdp, household income just 50% of national income), so they either export the entire difference (impossible even when they ran a 10% current account surplus), or invest massively in fixed asset/infrastructure projects domestically to put their resources to use and keep people employed. Huge, annual, systemic increases in total debt indicate more of those projects are unable to pay for the loans that financed them than are able to, and so until the economy is rebalanced, efforts to “clean up” bad debt or deleverage will always be swamped by new debt creation, unless either investment plunges and unemployment therefore rises dramatically, or there is a massive shift in wealth from the ccp to households (politically unlikely).