Alaska's debt load highest in US

According to a deep financial article by The New York Times, an economist from the American Enterprise Institute has ranked the states according to their debt-to-GDP ratios, and Alaska had the highest one -- with state debt at 70 percent of GDP. Ranking states based on that criteria is relatively common, but this ranking added a fair-market valuation of each state's pension fund to the debt column. Debts represented by pension funds are usually left unstated. The Times' article begins with Greece's recent financial catastrophe, and then discusses the question of whether or not a combination of derivative trading (interest-rate swaps in particular) and unstated pension-fund shortfalls may be setting high-debt U.S. states up for disaster, and at the same time helping them ignore the problem. Read more, here.