This world is quite magical – every major country owes astronomical sums of debt, but if you ask who the creditors are? The answer is hidden in a clever closed loop.

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis recently dissected this set of game rules on a program. He stated bluntly: the money owed by the government is essentially a transfer from one hand to the other. To illustrate with the United States, the largest creditors are not some mysterious consortium, but rather the Federal Reserve and social security funds, which are 'insiders'. Even more astonishing, ordinary citizens have unwittingly become the largest creditors through their pension accounts. You think you are saving money? In fact, you are lending money to the government.

The operations in Japan are even more interesting. They buy US treasuries not as charity, but to throw back the dollars earned from trade, which stabilizes the exchange rate and provides a safe haven for foreign exchange reserves. Therefore, in the eyes of developed economies, government bonds have become the coveted "safest asset" that everyone is eager to grab.

But Varoufakis shifted his tone and threw out a deadly warning: the biggest fear of this system is a collapse of confidence. It’s not that it hasn’t happened in history, it’s just that everyone has chosen to forget. Although mainstream views firmly believe that major economies are "too big to fail," there are now quite a few powder kegs – global debt is piled up like a mountain, interest rates remain high, political divisions are increasingly severe, and the climate crisis is lurking in the background. When these risks accumulate, one day a sudden collective panic could ignite, and the entire system would be finished.

The answer he ultimately summarized is quite ironic: Who is the creditor? All of us. Your pension, your bank deposits, the balance sheets of central banks, every transaction in cross-border trade… they are all tied to this ship. When the ship sinks, no one can escape.