GOVERNANCE WATCH
By InsidEntity Editorial Desk · Aug 21, 2026 · 22 min read
The United States Treasury reported on Wednesday, 19 August 2026 that total public debt outstanding had reached $40.047 trillion as at the close of Tuesday 18 August. It is the first time the figure has carried a four in front of it. Two days earlier and eleven time zones away, the 10-year Japanese government bond yield touched 2.945%, its highest in about three decades, and the Nikkei 225 fell 2.54% in a single session.
Eight days before either, at a media briefing in Tshwane on Tuesday, 11 August, Statistics South Africa published the number that produced the only band change in this article. It received a fraction of the coverage.
Neither the US milestone nor the Japanese bond move shifted any of the four markets here out of the ESR band it was already in.
The InsidEntity Economic Sustainability Rating is the product of a country’s inflation rate and its unemployment rate, expressed in points, where a lower score indicates higher economic stability. On the platform’s published bands, 1 to 25 is Benchmark, 26 to 50 is Efficient, 51 to 100 is Stable, 101 to 150 is Inefficient, and 151 and above is Unsustainable. Coverage runs to 249 countries and regions. Full country data, including credit ratings, ten-year finances, debt and revenue, and macroeconomic graphs, is on InsidEntity.
| Country | Q4 2025 | Q1 2026 | Q2 2026 | Band, Q2 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Japan | 8.25 | 3.82 | 3.83 | Benchmark |
| United Kingdom | 16.45 | 15.50 | 13.38 | Benchmark |
| United States | 11.76 | 11.70 | 16.35 | Benchmark |
| South Africa | 108.90 | 104.64 | 151.20 | Unsustainable |
Q4 2025 figures are the OECD-basis readings from the InsidEntity country dataset. Q1 2026 was compiled on 21 August 2026 from national statistical offices and had not previously been in the dataset. Q2 2026 is the existing published column.
What is confirmed
On South Africa, the confirmed record is as follows. Statistics South Africa released the Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the second quarter of 2026 under embargo at 11:00 on Tuesday 11 August, presented by Statistician-General Risenga Maluleke. The official unemployment rate, which Stats SA now reports as Labour Underutilisation measure LU1, rose by 0.9 of a percentage point from 32.7% in the first quarter to 33.6% in the second. That is the highest reading since the second quarter of 2022.
The composition of that move matters, and it is not a straightforward job-losses story. The number of unemployed people rose by 345,000 to 8.481 million. Employment fell by 16,000 to 16.739 million, a decline of roughly one tenth of one percent. The labour force grew by 329,000, or 1.3%, to 25.220 million. Discouraged job-seekers fell by 227,000 to 3.7 million, and the potential labour force fell by 280,000 to 4.571 million overall. In other words, the official rate rose principally because people who had previously stopped looking for work resumed looking, entering the labour force faster than the economy could absorb them, rather than because a large number of existing jobs disappeared.
The broader measures moved less. The combined rate of unemployment and time-related underemployment (LU2) rose to 36.6% from 35.9%. The combined rate of unemployment and potential labour force (LU3) rose only 0.1 of a percentage point to 43.8%. The composite measure (LU4) was unchanged at 46.3%. Formal sector employment fell by 41,000 and household employment by 9,000, while informal sector employment rose by 34,000. Employment gains were recorded in Trade (70,000), Construction (39,000) and Finance (11,000). By province, the Western Cape shed 48,000 jobs, Gauteng 22,000 and North West 15,000, while Mpumalanga added 41,000, the Eastern Cape 13,000 and the Free State 9,000. Youth unemployment among 15 to 34 year olds rose 1.5 percentage points to 47.4%, and 36.4% of the roughly 10.4 million South Africans aged 15 to 24 were not in employment, education or training.
The US debt composition matters more than the headline. Of the $40.047 trillion, $32.266 trillion is debt held by the public, meaning securities sold into the market to investors, pension funds, foreign central banks and the Federal Reserve. The remaining $7.782 trillion is intragovernmental holdings, principally obligations the federal government owes to its own trust funds. When commentators disagree about the real size of the US debt, this is usually the distinction they are arguing over.
The US debt milestone gets the headlines, but indexed to their own starting points a decade ago, South Africa’s debt has grown faster in percentage terms than America’s. The United States has roughly doubled its debt since January 2017. South Africa has nearly tripled its own since the 2016/17 fiscal year, from R2.2 trillion to R6.12 trillion. Two very different currencies and two very different economies, moving in the same direction at a faster pace in Pretoria than in Washington.
The pace is the part that should hold attention. The debt passed $38 trillion in October 2025 and $39 trillion in March 2026. Five months separated each milestone. The current statutory debt ceiling, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office, is $41.1 trillion. Total debt stood at $19.95 trillion in January 2017.
Interest on the federal debt now runs at roughly $1.1 trillion to $1.2 trillion a year, making it the second-largest line item in the federal budget behind Social Security and placing it above national defence. The July 2026 monthly deficit came in at $432.3 billion, the highest monthly total since March 2021. Borrowing across the first ten months of fiscal 2026 has already exceeded the total for all of fiscal 2025, with two months still to run. Part of that gap traces to the Supreme Court invalidating a large portion of the administration’s tariffs, which forced the Treasury to refund more than $100 billion in import duties already collected. The IMF’s April 2026 World Economic Outlook puts US gross debt at 126% of GDP.
Earlier in the same week the US 30-year Treasury yield reached its highest level since 2007. On Wednesday the Treasury announced it would more than double its repurchases of 10, 20 and 30-year debt over the coming months, an intervention aimed at long-end borrowing costs. Yields eased on the announcement. The 30-year US mortgage rate sits near 6.7%, according to Freddie Mac.
On Japan, the confirmed record is as follows. The 10-year JGB yield reached 2.945% on Tuesday 18 August and had retreated to around 2.84% by Thursday 20 August as US buybacks pulled global yields back. The Nikkei 225 closed at 67,461 on Tuesday, down 2.54%, a sharper single-day drop than either the Nasdaq 100 or the DAX recorded in the same session, then recovered 1.21% to 66,118 by Thursday. The index remains up roughly 36.5% year to date. The yen touched ¥159.76 to the dollar.
The 3% level is not an arbitrary round number. It is the interest rate assumption written into Japan’s own fiscal 2026 general-account budget. In that ¥122.3 trillion budget, debt-servicing costs for interest and redemption rose 10.8% to ¥31.3 trillion, calculated on a 3.0% assumed rate, the highest such assumption in 29 years. The Ministry of Finance’s own baseline puts servicing at ¥41 trillion by fiscal 2029 if yields reach 3.6%. The MOF’s most recent primary release, published 10 August 2026, puts central government debt at ¥1,346.6833 trillion as at 30 June 2026. The IMF projects Japanese general government debt at roughly 204% of GDP for 2026. Government estimates released in July put real GDP growth at 0.9% for the fiscal year ending March 2027 and 1.1% for the year after.
What is contested
The severity of the US position is contested by named parties, and the disagreement is substantive rather than rhetorical.
Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget described the fiscal decline of a global power as strikingly predictable. Michael Peterson of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation put the arithmetic forward instead, noting the current path reaches $50 trillion within roughly six years. Margaret Spellings of the Bipartisan Policy Center said the trajectory is unsustainable even under the most favourable assumptions. Against them, White House spokesman Kush Desai said the administration is focused on cutting waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending while accelerating growth to move the debt-to-GDP ratio in the right direction. Eric Swanson, formerly of the Federal Reserve, has made the narrower and separate point that US debt at 126% of GDP is lower than Japan’s and Italy’s, which is factually correct and does not by itself address the trajectory the other three are describing.
Those are four positions and one comparison, not five facts. Nothing in this article resolves them.
On Japan, the contested question is whether the growth assumption underpinning current fiscal policy survives the yield move. Prime Minister Takaichi’s case rests on growth outpacing borrowing costs, supported by a ¥370 trillion public-private investment programme. Justin Heng, APAC rates strategist at HSBC Global Investment Research, has said the administration’s economic blueprint effectively cemented an expansionary stance while loosening its own fiscal guardrails, and that additional debt issuance remains a plausible outcome. A proposed cut to the consumption tax on food could reduce revenue by as much as ¥5 trillion. With inflation near the Bank of Japan’s 2% target, real growth around 1%, and the 10-year yield brushing the government’s own 3% budget assumption, the premise is under visible strain. Whether it breaks is not yet on the record.
The ESR layer
Both quarterly inputs are constructed the same way: the simple average of the three monthly year-on-year prints published by the national statistical office for that quarter (for example, Q1 2026 inflation is the average of the January, February and March year-on-year CPI readings). This is the same construction InsidEntity already uses for the 2026 Q2 column in the published country dataset. It is not an official quarterly release, a quarter-end reading, or a quarterly average of the underlying index level, and none of the four national statistical offices here publish a native quarterly figure for these series. Where an official quarterly rate does exist and was used instead, that is stated against the figure (South Africa’s Q1 and Q2 unemployment rates below are Stats SA’s own quarterly QLFS releases, not monthly averages, because South Africa does not publish unemployment monthly).
The arithmetic, printed in full.
Q1 2026
| Country | Inflation | Unemployment | ESR | Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 2.70% | 4.33% | 11.70 | Benchmark |
| Japan | 1.43% | 2.67% | 3.82 | Benchmark |
| United Kingdom | 3.10% | 5.00% | 15.50 | Benchmark |
| South Africa | 3.20% | 32.70% | 104.64 | Inefficient |
Q2 2026
| Country | Inflation | Unemployment | ESR | Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 3.83% | 4.27% | 16.35 | Benchmark |
| Japan | 1.53% | 2.50% | 3.83 | Benchmark |
| United Kingdom | 2.73% | 4.90% | 13.38 | Benchmark |
| South Africa | 4.50% | 33.60% | 151.20 | Unsustainable |
ESR = inflation × unemployment. US 2.70 × 4.33 = 11.70 and 3.83 × 4.27 = 16.35. Japan 1.43 × 2.67 = 3.82 and 1.53 × 2.50 = 3.83. UK 3.10 × 5.00 = 15.50 and 2.73 × 4.90 = 13.38. South Africa 3.20 × 32.70 = 104.64 and 4.50 × 33.60 = 151.20.
Because the ESR is a product rather than a sum, it penalises economies where both inputs are elevated far more aggressively than an average would, and it is disproportionately sensitive to whichever input is larger. South Africa’s structural unemployment therefore dominates its ESR even in quarters where its inflation is unremarkable. That is a property of the instrument, not a fault in the data, and any analyst reading the score should hold it in mind.
The band change, and how narrow it is
South Africa moved from Inefficient into Unsustainable between the first and second quarters of 2026. It is the only band change among the four markets across the three quarters in the table above, and it deserves to be stated precisely rather than dramatically.
The first correction to make is that this is a return, not an arrival. South Africa’s ESR history on the OECD basis puts the quarter in a context that a three-quarter table cannot.
| Period | ESR | Band |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 157.78 | Unsustainable |
| 2022 | 231.15 | Unsustainable |
| 2023 | 192.60 | Unsustainable |
| 2024 | 144.76 | Inefficient |
| 2025 | 108.90 | Inefficient |
| Q1 2026 | 104.64 | Inefficient |
| Q2 2026 | 151.20 | Unsustainable |
World Bank and IMF bases produce the same band in every period. The 2022 peak reads 231.62 on the World Bank basis and 231.15 on the IMF and OECD bases.
South Africa occupied the Unsustainable band for three consecutive years to 2023, left it in 2024, improved for two further years, and has now re-entered it. The current reading of 151.20 is the mildest Unsustainable score the country has recorded in this dataset, and it is 80 points better than the 2022 peak. It is also only 6.44 points worse than the 2024 reading of 144.76, which sat in the band below. Those two figures are one bad fuel-price quarter apart and are separated by a band boundary, which is a fair description of how much weight the boundary itself should carry.
The Q1 reading of 104.64 was nonetheless South Africa’s best in the series. Inflation dipped to 3.0% in February on falling fuel prices, and the Q4 2025 official unemployment rate of 31.4% was the lowest since the third quarter of 2020. Then April’s fuel price increases pushed CPI from 3.1% in March to 4.0% in April and onward to 4.5% by the second quarter, while the official unemployment rate rose from 32.7% in Q1 to 33.6% in Q2. The ESR deteriorated 44.5% in a single quarter.
Here is the second thing that should temper the headline. The Unsustainable band begins at 151. South Africa scored 151.20. The margin is 0.20 points.
Had second-quarter inflation printed at 4.49% rather than 4.50%, the ESR would read 150.86 and South Africa would still be Inefficient. Had unemployment come in at 33.5% rather than 33.6%, the score would read 150.75, and the same. Both inputs are first-release figures subject to revision by Stats SA. A band change decided by two hundredths of a point on unrevised data is a real signal about direction and a fragile one about level, and it should be reported as both.
What is not fragile is the trajectory underneath it. Three consecutive quarterly unemployment prints of 31.4%, 32.7% and 33.6% move in one direction, and the inflation path from 3.2% to 4.5% moves with them rather than against them. The band change is the marginal call. The deterioration is not.
There is a third caveat the ESR itself cannot carry, and it belongs here rather than in a footnote. As set out above, the Q2 unemployment rise was driven far more by 329,000 people entering the labour force than by the 16,000 net jobs lost. Discouraged job-seekers fell by 227,000 over the same quarter. A rising official unemployment rate produced partly by people resuming their search is a different economic event from one produced by mass retrenchment, and the broader LU3 measure, which counts the discouraged, moved only 0.1 of a percentage point.
The ESR reads the official rate, so it reads the higher number and bands South Africa accordingly. That is the instrument behaving as designed, and it is also the clearest illustration in this article of why a single score should be read with the country dataset open beside it rather than on its own. Read with the history above, the honest summary is narrower than the headline: South Africa has given back two years of improvement in one quarter and sits fractionally on the wrong side of a line it was well clear of three years ago.
The reading this article did not expect
The prediction, before the quarterly figures came back, was that the United States would carry this month’s story. It passed a $40 trillion milestone, its interest bill exceeds its defence budget, and its 30-year yield hit a nineteen-year high in the same week. On the ESR it scores 16.35 and sits in the Benchmark band, alongside Japan and the United Kingdom.
Japan is the sharper reversal. It has the best ESR of the four markets here, at 3.83, and the worst fiscal position of the four by a wide margin at roughly 204% of GDP. Its ESR improved by 53.6% between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026, driven by inflation falling to 1.5% and unemployment holding between 2.5% and 2.7%. Between the first and second quarters it moved 0.07%, which is flat. Over that same quarter its 10-year yield climbed toward a thirty-year high, its equity market took its sharpest single-day loss of the summer, and its currency weakened past ¥159 to the dollar.
An economic sustainability reading that does not move at all while the bond market repricing that country’s debt reaches a three-decade extreme is the clearest evidence in this article of what the instrument does and does not see.
That is not a contradiction in the data. It is the instrument doing exactly what it was built to do and nothing more. A country can run a genuinely healthy domestic price and labour picture and still be in fiscal trouble, because fiscal trouble is priced by bond markets and CPI prints are not.
This series made the same argument in July, introducing the Financial Stability Rating alongside the Company Risk Rating on the view that a strong governance score is not a statement about financial soundness. Shoprite and SPAR coverage on this platform each paired a governance rating with a low Financial Stability Rating for different underlying reasons, which is the company-level version of the same principle. The ESR answers whether an economy’s price and labour dynamics are stable. It does not answer whether a sovereign can service its obligations at prevailing yields.
There is one further comparison worth making carefully. InsidEntity’s own published ESR card ranks ten selected countries, with Qatar at 0.15, France at 9, Mexico at 10.73, Saudi Arabia at 11.04, Indonesia at 13.83 and Russia at 15, all in the Benchmark band, against Rwanda at 92.8, Türkiye at 283 and Argentina at 286. On its second-quarter reading of 16.35, the United States scores above every country on that published list except the three at the bottom of it. That comparison is directional only, because the card’s figures are undated and are not stated to be second-quarter 2026 readings. Treat it as a platform figure pending a like-for-like period match, not as a settled ranking.
What the ESR is, and what it deliberately is not
The ESR is one of four proprietary ratings InsidEntity maintains, and it is the only one of the four that operates at sovereign level.
| Rating | Level | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Company Risk Rating (CRR) | Company | Governance, scored 1 to 5, weighted 40% Director Independence and 20% each for Director Capacity, Auditor Independence and Shareholder Influence |
| Financial Stability Rating (FSR) | Company | Financial soundness, scored out of five on revenue growth, net profit after tax margin, net asset value, current ratio and cash ratio |
| Health Status Rating (HSR) | Company | Operating health, built to surface deterioration before it reaches the share price |
| Economic Sustainability Rating (ESR) | Sovereign | Future economic sustainability, calculated as inflation × unemployment across 249 countries and regions, updated quarterly |
Three of the four read a company. One reads the country that company operates in. The instruments are deliberately separate because they answer questions that do not substitute for one another, and this article is a demonstration of why that separation matters.
The ESR does not measure fiscal solvency. Japan proves the point in a single row of the table above: the best ESR of the four markets here and roughly 204% of GDP in debt. It does not measure debt stock, debt-to-GDP, servicing cost as a share of revenue, maturity profile, or the yield assumption written into a national budget. Those sit in the country dataset alongside the rating, not inside it. It does not measure sentiment, and it does not measure governance quality, which is what the CRR exists for.
What it does measure, it measures in a specific way that a reader should hold in mind. Because it is a product rather than a sum, the score rises disproportionately when both inflation and unemployment are elevated at the same time, more than an average of the two would suggest. That also means the ESR is disproportionately sensitive to whichever input is larger in absolute terms. South Africa’s structural unemployment, running in the low thirties against inflation in the low single digits, therefore drives its score far more than its inflation does, in almost every quarter.
There is a use case the platform’s own published material names directly, and it is the reason the four instruments sit on one system: companies operating in more than one country should weigh their profitability against the country risk they are carrying. A CRR of 3.70 means one thing for a company whose revenue sits in a Benchmark-band economy and something materially different for the same score in a country that has just returned to Unsustainable. South Africa’s move this quarter changes the country layer under every JSE-listed company this platform covers, without a single one of their governance scores moving at all. Shoprite’s 3.70 and SPAR’s 3.48 are both unchanged by it, and both now sit on different ground than they did in the first quarter.
The second number
The ESR is one instrument. The debt and servicing layer in the country dataset is another, and read together they order the four markets almost in reverse.
| Country | Gross debt | Debt to GDP | Servicing cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | $40.047tn (18 Aug 2026) | 126% (IMF, Apr 2026) | $1.1tn to $1.2tn a year, above defence |
| Japan | ¥1,346.68tn (30 Jun 2026) | ~204% (IMF, 2026) | ¥31.3tn budgeted FY2026, at a 3.0% assumed rate |
| United Kingdom | PSND near £3tn (Jun 2026) | ~100% of GDP | £11.8bn interest in June 2026 alone |
| South Africa | R6.12tn (2025/26) | 78.9%, peaking | R432.4bn in 2025/26 |
Sources: US Treasury Daily Statement; Japan Ministry of Finance, Central Government Debt as of 30 June 2026, published 10 August 2026; ONS Public Sector Finances; National Treasury 2026 Budget Review. UK figures are PSND; the government’s own fiscal-rule metric is now PSNFL, which stood at £2.7tn, or 84.5% of GDP, at end June 2026.
Widen the lens to the full G7 and South Africa’s debt-to-GDP ratio sits where its ESR would suggest it shouldn’t: comfortably in the middle of the pack, well below the United States, and nowhere near Japan.
South Africa has the best fiscal position of the four on this table and the worst ESR by a factor of nearly forty. Its National Treasury projects debt stabilising in 2025/26 for the first time in seventeen years before declining to 76.5% by 2028/29, and the country secured its first sovereign credit rating upgrade in sixteen years and removal from the FATF grey list in the same budget cycle. Debt-service costs of R432.4 billion nonetheless exceed what the country spends on education, on health, or on community development.
Japan has the worst fiscal position on this table and the best ESR. The United States sits in the middle on both and is the only one of the four whose ESR deteriorated materially in the most recent quarter, by 39.8%, driven almost entirely by inflation rising from a 2.70% quarterly average to 3.83% while unemployment barely moved.
Neither instrument alone would carry the same force as the two of them read together, at the same four countries, in the same quarter.
The verification gaps worth naming
Three items in this article are not fully sourced to the standard this platform applies, and they are named here rather than buried.
The Q1 2026 column did not previously exist in the InsidEntity country dataset, which ran from 2025 straight to the 2026 Q2 column. It was compiled on 21 August 2026 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Japan’s Statistics Bureau, the ONS and Stats SA, on the same construction used for the Q2 column, being the simple average of the three monthly year-on-year prints for January, February and March. It is a new figure, not a previously published one.
Japan’s March 2026 unemployment rate was initially carried at 2.6% by continuation from February. It has since been verified and the assumption was wrong. Statistics Japan’s Labour Force Survey put the seasonally adjusted March rate at 2.7%, up 0.1 of a percentage point on February, with 1.94 million people unemployed. Japan’s Q1 unemployment average is therefore 2.67% rather than 2.63%, and its Q1 ESR is 3.82 rather than 3.77. The band does not change. The figures in this article are the corrected ones.
That correction has one consequence worth stating. On the original figure Japan’s ESR appeared to deteriorate 1.3% between the first and second quarters. On the verified figure it moved 0.07%, which is flat to two decimal places. Japan’s economic sustainability reading did not change at all across the quarter in which its 10-year yield reached a thirty-year high.
United Kingdom Q1 unemployment uses the harmonised OECD-basis rate of 5.0%, per House of Commons Library briefing CBP-9040 of 29 June 2026, whereas the Q2 column uses the ONS three-month rolling rate. The ONS rolling rate to January 2026 was 5.2%. Those are two different measures, and the two quarters in the table above are therefore not constructed on an identical basis. That should be aligned before the next quarterly refresh.
All Q1 and Q2 2026 figures across all four countries are first-release or early-revision prints and remain subject to revision by the issuing statistical office.
What to watch
Five things. Whether South Africa’s third-quarter reading confirms the band change or reverses it, given that a 0.20 point margin on unrevised data could go either way on a single Stats SA revision, with the Q3 2026 QLFS due around the middle of the fourth quarter and the discouraged-worker flow the specific line to watch. Whether the US ESR deterioration continues into the third quarter, since the 39.8% quarterly move was an energy-driven inflation story and CPI has already eased to 3.4% in July from 3.5% in June. Whether Japan’s 10-year yield sustains a move above the 3.0% rate its own budget assumes, which is the point at which actual servicing costs exceed budgeted ones. Whether the US debt ceiling fight arrives ahead of schedule, given that $41.1 trillion sits roughly five months away on the cadence of the last two milestones. And whether the United Kingdom, the only one of the four improving on both ESR inputs, holds that improvement against a public sector net debt near £3 trillion and a Bank of England base rate that has already fallen to 3.75%.
Country ESR scores, ten-year finances, debt and revenue data, credit ratings and macroeconomic comparisons across 249 countries and regions are on InsidEntity. A debt milestone tells you what a government owes. The ESR tells you what its economy is doing while it owes it. They are different questions, and this quarter they have different answers.
About the InsidEntity Economic Sustainability Rating
The InsidEntity Economic Sustainability Rating (ESR) is a quarterly indicator of a country’s economic sustainability, calculated as the product of its inflation rate and its unemployment rate. A lower score indicates higher economic stability. The published bands are Benchmark at 1 to 25, Efficient at 26 to 50, Stable at 51 to 100, Inefficient at 101 to 150, and Unsustainable at 151 and above. ESR scores are updated quarterly and cover 249 countries and regions.
The ESR is one of four InsidEntity ratings. The Company Risk Rating (CRR) scores governance on a 1 to 5 scale, weighted 40% Director Independence and 20% each for Director Capacity, Auditor Independence and Shareholder Influence, with the published overall rating the average of the four pillar scores. The Financial Stability Rating (FSR) scores financial soundness out of five on revenue growth, net profit after tax margin, net asset value, current ratio and cash ratio. The Health Status Rating (HSR) scores operating health. Those three read companies. The ESR reads the countries they operate in. All four update regularly as corporate and economic changes occur, so the platform is always the current view. Explore country data and company ratings across 145 stock exchanges at InsidEntity.
Know your entity. This article reports confirmed figures from the US Treasury, Japan’s Ministry of Finance, the ONS, Stats SA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the IMF, alongside named commentary from parties who disagree about what those figures mean. No findings have been made regarding the contested interpretations. One verification item, the UK’s Q1 versus Q2 unemployment measure basis, remains open and is named in the text. This is independent research, not financial advice.