Top 10 Countries the U.S. Owes Money To

In 1989, New York real estate investor Seymour Durst spent $120,000 to erect a "National Debt Clock" in Times Square to track the amount of money the United States was in the hole. At the time, the country had run up a $2.7 trillion tab, but that figure has continued to rise [source: Stephey]. After briefly exceeding the number of available clock digits in 2008 as the national debt crested $10 trillion, the debt clock, now equipped to track up to a quadrillion dollars, displays more than $14 trillion that the U.S. government owes to various entities [source: U.S. Debt Clock].

When we talk about to whom the U.S. government owes money, we're talking specifically about the public debt. This is debt that the "public" -- including individuals, corporations, state and local governments and foreign governments – buys from the U.S. federal government in the form of U.S. Treasury securities, which are essentially government-backed IOUs [source: TreasuryDirect.gov ]. It's the go-to gauge for indebtedness, since it indicates how much cash the government gobbles up from external sources in order to fund itself.

To assess the severity of debt on a global scale, federal debt is calculated as a percentage of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP), aka the market value of all goods and services produced within a country. In the United States, that percentage has escalated rapidly from 36 percent in 2003 to 62 percent in 2010 [source: U.S. Government Accountability Office]. In other words, we're spending more than half of our national paycheck, the GDP, on debt obligations.

Where are those trillions going, and how does the U.S. national debt rank against other countries? Find out in this global parade of American federal government creditors.