New Delhi, July 30 -- Policy reports from multilateral institutions are often an antidote to insomnia. But not theGlobal Debt Report 2025 released by the OECD in March. It has characteristics that compare favourably with a cliff-hanging pulp thriller. Factoid-after-factoid of growing developed-world indebtedness leaves the reader almost numb with worry. OECD sovereign debt has climbed from $5 trillion before the global financial crisis (GFC) in 2007 to $15.7 trillion last year.

The culprit in part has been quantitative easing, when central banks increased money supply after the GFC. But the rise in debt at the government and corporate levels seems unyielding more than a decade-and-a-half later. This opening salvo from the report's summar...