I.O.U.S.A.

The documentary is about American debt. It counts four separate deficits: the budget deficit, the trade deficit, the savings deficit and the leadership deficit. At its centre is David Walker, who left his post as the country's Comptroller General and started travelling from city to city to talk about this. The film follows that tour, cutting in the history: how the debt grew from the civil war to now, the future load of Social Security and Medicare, how interest compounds. Patrick Creadon directs; eighty-five minutes, with Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan, Paul Volcker and Robert Rubin among those speaking. It came out in 2008, just before the crisis broke. The figures it gives are not in dispute; how much debt is dangerous, and when it becomes a problem, is still argued over among economists.