Not about debt

From Roger Farmer, from a pretty interesting article:

It also matters, a lot, who holds the [government] debt. Large values of domestically held debt are simply a redistribution from future to current taxpayers. Large values of foreign held debt however represent a claim on the domestic economy by foreigners. Foreign held debt is much less benign than domestic debt.

Large values of foreign-held debt are a problem, Farmer says, but large values of domestically-held debt are not. I don't want to evaluate the validity of the statement or anything like that. I just want to note that Farmer distinguishes between domestic and foreign. And I want to ask why people don't make the same distinction when it comes to, say, Brexit.

Being separate from the EU is like having domestic debt. Being in the EU is like having foreign debt. Actually, it's like taking domestic and foreign debt, adding them together, and calling the result domestic. I think people should object to this in principle.

One is much less benign than the other.