The thesis of this article is that we have a perfectly reasonable model to work with to get ourselves out of this mess.
The Brady Plan did work.
The debt ratio to assets of this country are much healthier than almost all the other countries of the world.
I am astonished you could make such a statement. A Balance Sheet has three components, not one. To reference debt in a vacuum without showing assets and net worth is ignorance.
First the most important things on a balance sheet are income and outgo. Whimpy cannot trade his suit to repay his hamburger debt.
Second, the problem with estimating our assets is that you cannot liquidate the assets of the US to pay $62T. Third, the $62T needs to be compared to GDP which is about $13T. Reasonable principal and interest on $62 T would be about $6.2 T per annum (sort of like a mortgage). That is almost half of GDP. Fortunately a lot of that is just transfer payments from working people through WS and back to themselves in their 401K, pension funds, etc. But a significant fraction of that $6.2T is one group living off of the work done by the rest of us.
Notwithstanding the arguments over balance sheet semantics which follow...
Our assets are inflated and meaningless unless they can be liquidated. The $51T in total credit market debt cannot be supported on a $14T GDP, particularly one with a low profit margin (our service economy). The problem with mark-to-model is that it only works as credit is expanding which it was during most of the period of the Brady plan. The banks had the long term confidence of creditors because their balance sheet was comprehensible. A mark-to-model balance sheet is not, and in a credit deflation the credit flows stop that much quicker when the assets are unknown.
I did not even begin to address the problems with the credit bubble and the moral hazards that the government creates and the systemic risk that the securities industry has created.