You may not be aware of it, but you - and every other Jamaican - were, at the end of January, in debt to the tune of nearly $450,000.
That is apart from any money you may have borrowed from your commercial bank, credit union, building society, the National Housing Trust or any similar institution. It is your share of the over $1.165 trillion owed by the Jamaican Government which, ultimately, is the responsibility of the country's 2.6 million people.
About 45 per cent of the debt, that is, US$6.155 billion, is owed to foreigners, based on the postings by the finance ministry for February on the country's debt profile. That would translate, by The Gleaner's estimate, to around J$529.31 billion, slightly down on J$537.4 billion recorded by the authorities in January.
The finance ministry has not yet published a profile of the country's domestic debt for February, but based on the latest available information, the Government, at the end of January, owed Jamaican institutions $627.4 billion, with $580.86 billion, or just under 85 per cent of total amount deno-minated in Jamaican dollars.
About 11 per cent (J$68.64 billion) of the internal debt, based on the Jamaican dollar equivalent, was owed in US dollars and a little over four per cent was debt indexed to the US dollar. Less than one per cent of the domestic debt was denominated in euros.
Based on these numbers, the Jamaican Government, at the end of January, would have owed $241,305,669 on behalf of each Jamaican on the domestic portion of the debt.
In January, each Jamaican in relation to the foreign debt, as quoted in US dollars, would be responsible for around US$2,402.48. But when converted to Jamaican dollars, each person's obligation would have been J$206,776.23.
By the end of February, however, based on the finance ministry's adjusted data, the US currency obligation had drifted downward to US$2,367.22, a drop of US$35.26. In Jamaican dollar terms, each Jamaican owed J$203,581,18 on the foreign debt.
Biggest chunk
Of the total external debt, the biggest chunk, US$4.119 billion or 67 per cent, was held by private creditors, with the fattest portion of that, US$3.8 billion, or 92 per cent being in the form of bonds.
Commercial banks were owed US$277.68 million, a mere four and half per cent of the total external debt and a little under seven per cent of what was owned to foreign private creditors.
Approximately US$1.35 billion, or 22 per cent, of the external was held by multilateral institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank at the end of February. The so-called bilateral debt was US$684.67 million or 11 per cent of what was owed abroad.
In terms of the domestic debt, at the end of January, the latest period for which up-to-date figures were available, the largest block, J$314.228 billion, or half of the amount, was in the form of investment debenture and bonds, while J$204.72 or 33 per cent were local registered stocks. Another J$68.648 billion of roughly 11 per cent were in the form of US dollar-denominated bonds.