For institutional investors

Credit and allocation decisions lean on debt-to-GDP — a liability divided by a flow — because no comparable balance-sheet view of a sovereign exists to ask the solvency question directly.

You price a sovereign the way the market prices it: debt-to-GDP, deficit ratios, growth forecasts. Every one of them is a flow metric, and the question behind a credit or allocation decision is not a flow question — it is solvency. What does this country own, what does it owe, and is the gap widening or closing. Debt-to-GDP answers a different question by construction: it divides a liability by a year’s worth of output, because output is what national accounting hands you. No comparable balance sheet exists, so the flow number stands in for the stock question by default, not by choice.

FAND is that balance sheet. The identity is the one a credit desk already thinks in — assets, liabilities, net worth — closed to the cent for 200+ of the 237 economies, 1950–2025: CW = PA + NC + RW, with a Residual Wealth term (human capital, institutional trust, rule of law) that conventional accounts drop entirely. Cross-border exposure is carried the way exposure actually behaves under stress: gross assets and gross liabilities as independent stocks, not netted into a single NIIP figure that can mask a large two-sided position behind a small net one. Start with the United States ledger — the anchor exhibit, decadal from 1955, the one country whose figures are publishable without qualification — to see the shape of what a full sovereign balance sheet looks like before you go looking for the country you actually hold.

Every figure carries a NUSAP signature — source tier, uncertainty band, qualitative assessment — rather than arriving as a bare number. To this audience that reads as risk disclosure, not decoration: a HIGH-assessment, Tier-1 figure is one thing to underwrite against, and a modeled LOW-assessment fallback is another, and the distinction is on the page rather than buried in a footnote or absent entirely. The comparative note against the World Bank’s Changing Wealth of Nations methodology explains the specific accounting choices — gross cross-border, an explicit substantive-rights term — that matter most for exposure work.

The convergence essay is the finding that should unsettle a flow-based risk model most: of the 46 economies that reached their historical high-water mark against the US frontier under the Bretton-Woods fixed-rate system, 42 have since fallen back below 30% of it. Convergence, when it happened at all, happened after that system broke and mostly to countries it was never built for. A growth forecast extrapolates the next few years; the balance sheet and the convergence record together are what tell you whether a country has been closing the gap for decades or has been quietly failing to for just as long.