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I know that Robert Samuelson is a "pop" economist and not to be taken as seriously as the heavyweights like Krugman or Stiglitz, but what many people miss about economics is that it--to the extent it is a science at all-- is a social science, not a hard science. Economics depends in part on psychology, for not all or even most economic players or actors are consitently logical profit and wealth maximizers. If enough people get spooked about holding dollars, for example, we might get inflation or higher interest rates even in a recession. So Samuelson's views may be of interest here.

He points out that Japanese bond yields remain very low despite public debt approaching 200% of GDP. But nearly all creditors of this debt are themselves Japanese. As in FDR's America, they owe it to themselves. Contrast this with the USA today; about half the federal debt is foreign owned. So there might be more chance of the dollar losing value even while the debt as a proportion of GDP is much lower (Samuelson says 41 percent in 2008, but I thought we Uncle Sam owed about $11 trillion, or about 70% of GDP).

I agree with his point that

The correct conclusion to draw is not that major governments (such as Japan and the United States) can easily borrow as much as they want. It is that they can easily borrow as much as they want until confidence that they can do so evaporates -- and we don't know when, how or whether that may happen.

I think this is also true of the arguments that because we now have (mild) deflation, that Bernanke can print as much money as he likes and there will be no penalty. At some point in the future we reach a tipping point, and then there most definitely will be a penalty. And since my worries are shared by a large section of the population, there already is a social penalty. Government is losing credibility. That so many governments have chosen to print money instead of redistribute wealth from top to bottom doesn't lessen the loss of street cred for each individual regime, but in fact heightens the risk that when we do get inflation, it will be a global phenomenon as it was in the 1970s.

A different and alarming take on Japan's government debt (186% of GDP) indicating that past a certain point, it no longer matters if "we owe it to ourselves".

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The savings rate has crashed from 15pc in 1990 to near 2pc today, half America's rate. Japan's $1.5 trillion state pension fund (the world's biggest) has become a net seller of government bonds this year, as it must to meet pay-out obligations. The demographic crunch has hit. The workforce been contracting since 2005.

If Japan's bond rates rise to global levels of 3pc to 4pc, interest costs will shatter state finances.

"The debt situation is irrecoverable," said Carl Weinberg from High Frequency Economics. "I don't see any orderly way out of this. They will not be able to fund their deficit. There will be a fiscal shutdown, a pension haircut, and bank failures that will rock the world. It is criminally negligent that rating agencies are not blowing the whistle on this."

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The article goes on to make a lot of criticisms about postwar Japanese policy.

My thinking is that if Japan goes broke, and they are big creditors of ours, they might want some of the approximately $600 billion of their money back at a very inopportune moment.

Both of your links are pretty spooky. I would say we should be worried about sovereign debt defaults in the cases of BOTH America and Japan.

But, if it came to Japan suddenly 'wanting' their $600 billion back, at some inopportune time, I rather strongly suspect that America would be collectively thumbing a very large nose at them.

We seem to think that other countries should be grateful for the opportunity to give us their money. It is simply part of the American hubris, perhaps an inevitable symptom or characteristic of the late imperial stage of decline.

Perhaps a natural follow-up question is: how would China react to sovereign debt defaults by Japan and/or the United States?

And, if you ask me, that's when things get really scary.