North Korea literally ordered one thousand luxury Volvo sedans from Sweden in the 1970s and then just completely ghosted them on the invoice after the cars were successfully delivered.

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North Korea literally ordered one thousand luxury Volvo sedans from Sweden in the 1970s and then just completely ghosted them on the invoice after the cars were successfully delivered. To this very day, the Swedish government recalculates the debt every single year, which has now ballooned to over three hundred million euros with accumulated interest. Kim Il-sung essentially pulled off the greatest grand theft auto in recorded human history and legally got away with it because you cannot exactly repossess a fleet of cars from a heavily armed rogue state. Those vintage Volvos are reportedly still driving around Pyongyang right now, serving as a hilarious monument to the time a socialist dictatorship successfully scammed a neutral European democracy out of a small fortune in premium Scandinavian engineering!

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North Korea literally ordered one thousand luxury Volvo sedans from Sweden in the 1970s and then just completely ghosted them on the invoice after the cars were successfully delivered.

A closer look

A bigger world.One discoveryat a time.

Keep exploring

Japan possesses the highest national public debt in the developed world, routinely hovering around two hundred and sixty percent of their entire gross domestic product.

Credit card companies actively refer to customers who pay off their balances in full every month as 'deadbeats' because they don't generate any revenue from exorbitant interest rates.

Thomas Jefferson died deep in debt

The Sumerians invented compound interest before the wheel

Global debt has ballooned to over 300 trillion dollars, a figure that massively outweighs the total amount of actual, physical money and easily accessible liquid assets that currently exist on planet Earth.

Issuing government bonds is borrowing from grandchildren

A bigger world.
One discovery
at a time.