I enjoyed an analysis of the Euro debt crisis by Bill Marsh of the New York Times, but I was curious to see how the data would look in D3’s chord layout. Chord layouts are great for showing asymmetric relationships among a group of entities—in this case, debt owed by countries.
For this visualization, I decided to create two chord diagrams. The diagram on the left emphasizes how much each country lends; you can see Japan and France are the biggest lenders, but France is also the most exposed by its risky debts to Italy and Greece. The diagram on the right emphasizes how much each country owes; the United States has by far the largest debt, nearly three times the size of the next-largest debtor, Britain!