The U.S. Balance Sheet

Pete Peterson's $1 Billion Bully Pulpit.

Imagine a humongous business with assets of $1.6 trillion, balance sheet liabilities north of $10 trillion and off-balance-sheet obligations of $41 trillion. That's debt--whether explicit liabilities, commitments and contingencies, or implicit exposure--that produces a debt to assets ratio of 32-to-1, roughly similar to the late and not-so-great Bear Stearns and the quickly departed Carlyle Credit Corp., which lost a bundle for its well-heeled investors.