With the Olympics in full swing (and the U.S. pulling ahead of China in the medal count yesterday- U-S-A!!), the folks over at Bond Vigilantes are keeping the conversation focused on the global economy- and it’s a bitter pill to swallow. They write (emphasis ours):

Rough cost of the Olympics – £9bn, US national debt – $15.8tn, Quantitative easing – £375bn. These numbers blow my mind. I know they’re big but I don’t really have a concept of how big. So I thought I’d try and put them into some context. I took a look at the national debt of the Euro’s peripheral countries and calculated how many gold medals each country would need to win to pay off their debts.

Of the 412 grams that a London 2012 gold medal weighs roughly 6 grams are gold, 381 are silver and the remaining 25 copper. Giving a market price today of about $700.

Below is a table of how many gold medals each country would have to win to get themselves out of the red:

Gold medals needed:

Portugal – 273,728,118

Ireland – 220,449,211

Italy – 3,445,899,490

Greece – 627,153,707

Spain – 1,295,304,783

 

That works out to each member of the population needing to win the following:

Gold medals needed per person:

Portugal – 26

Ireland – 48

Italy – 57

Greece – 56

Spain – 28

That there are only 302 possible medal events in the entire competition makes this pretty depressing reading for our European friends, especially given where they are sitting the medals table (as I type). If it makes you feel any better every US citizen would have to win 73 gold medals to get them out of their hole.

That’s the funny (or, really, not-so-funny) part of all of this. We’re perpetually concerned about Europe and when they’re going to get their act together, but we aren’t doing too hot stateside, either. And our markets grow ever more dysfunctional by the day. An uptick in unemployment this morning is sending the markets neon green today, which seems counter-intuitive, but is really just reflective of people getting excited about another potential round of QE3. We’re toeing ever closer to that fiscal cliff, and we all know just how congenial politicians get the closer we move to a deadline. Barring the mass transformation of the nation into a bunch of clones of Michael Phelps and Gabby Douglas, looks like that medal count is one of the few things we have to be happy about these days.