Since the onset of the financial crisis, public debt in the OECD countries has reached levels that are historically unprecedented outside of the World Wars. In the past several weeks alone, Greece finalized the terms of its latest austerity package, Puerto Rico defaulted on a bond payment for the first time in its history, and Ukraine narrowly averted the same outcome and is now attempting to renegotiate the terms of its massive debts — a familiar story to the rest of southern and eastern Europe.

So should the American public be worried about a sovereign debt crisis of its own? “No!” scream exasperated liberal economists like Paul Krugman. Krugman argues that because the US can print and borrow in its own currency, and because interest rates are presently very low, national debt is unlikely to generate the same sort of difficulties.

But Krugman goes much further than a dismissal of alarmism, defending the debt on the grounds that “one person’s debt is another person’s asset.” Rising debt therefore “could be a good sign.” Historical proof of this, he writes, is that “Britain did not emerge impoverished from the Napoleonic Wars; the government ended up with a lot of debt, but the counterpart of this debt was that the British propertied classes owned a lot of consols (bonds).”