The second curious anomaly about these supposedly careful, parsimonious Lutheran Danes is their gargantuan, world-leading private debt levels. Though Denmark’s national debt is relatively modest at half the EU average, according to a recent IMF warning, the Danish people have personally indebted themselves up to their Gucci glasses. Today, Danish households have the highest ratio of debt-to-income of any country in the Western world: the Danes owe, on average, 310 percent of their annual income, more than double that of the Portuguese or Spanish, and quadruple that of the Italians. An
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