Quotes About Debt

A new figure of the poor is emerging, which includes not only the unemployed and the precarious workers with irregular, part-time work, but also the stable waged workers and the impoverished strata of the so-called middle class. Their poverty is characterized primarily by the chains of debt. The increasing generality of indebtedness today marks a return to relations of servitude reminiscent of another time. And yet, much has changed.

finance was to become a public utility, situated in the public domain or at least alongside a public banking option. Instead, the past century's expansion of predatory credit has been reinforced by de-taxing interest, land rent, financial speculation, debt leveraging and "capital" (asset-price) gains.

this sounds like a Ponzi scheme it is because it is the mother of all Ponzi schemes. A merry go around of Ponzi Austerity which, interestingly, left both the insolvent banks and the insolvent Greek state a little more… insolvent

The neo-rentier objective is threefold: to reduce economies to debt dependency, to transfer public utilities into creditor hands, and then to create a rent-extracting tollbooth economy. The financial objective is to block governments from writing down debts when bankers and bondholders over-lend.

The starting point of the 2014 BIS report is the main theme of the present book: We are not in a typical cyclical downturn, but have reached the culmination of a long buildup of cycles. Each recovery since 1945 has added more debt, increasing carrying charges that divert spending away from current goods and services (debt deflation, as Chapter 8 has discussed).

The way societies have coped with this deepening indebtedness should be the starting point of financial theorizing. Money is not a "factor of production." It is a claim on the output or income that others produce. Debtors do the work, not the lenders. Before a formal market for wage labor developed in antiquity, money lending was the major way to obtain the services of bondservants who were compelled to work off the interest that was owed.

Today's self-multiplying debt overhead absorbs profits, rents, personal income and tax revenue in a process whose mathematics is much like that of environmental pollution. Evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson demonstrates how impossible it is for growth to proceed at exponential rates without encountering a limit. He cites "the arithmetical riddle of the lily pond. A lily pod is placed in a pond. Each day thereafter the pod and then all its descendants double

Financialization is the major dynamic polarizing today's economies. Its aim is to appropriate the means of production and rent-extracting privileges for a creditor class to load labor, industry, agriculture and governments down with debt. Employment, wages and capital investment cannot recover as long as the resulting debt overhead is left in place.

The aim of predatory lending in much of the world is to obtain labor to work off debts (debt peonage), to foreclose on the land of debtors, and in modern times to force debt-strapped governments to privatize natural resources and public infrastructure.

Eurozone financial institutions have sought to impose Latvia's "model" austerity on Ireland, Spain and Portugal – and most of all, on Greece, which is being made an object lesson of how creditor powers will treat countries that try to extricate themselves from debt, unemployment, privatization, emigration and demographic collapse.

Instead of restructuring economies with a clean slate to resume progress, the financial class is using today's debt crisis to vest itself as the new elite to rule the remainder of the 21st century. To consolidate their position, financiers are sponsoring a property grab – privatization

The IMF also said its own analysis of the future development of debt was wrong 'by a large margin.' … The IMF had originally projected Greece would lose 5.5% of its economic output between 2009 and 2012. The country has lost 17% in real gross domestic output instead. The plan predicted a 15% unemployment rate in 2012. It was 25%.

In effect, he ruled that no writedowns are legal. No government's debt can be written down if any holder disagrees, regardless of how voluntarily they may be negotiated or how reasonable they may be.

the economic aim of debt jubilees was to restore solvency to the population as a whole. Many royal proclamations also freed businesses from various taxes and tariff duties, but the main objective was political and ideological. It was to create a fair and equitable society.

Commercial "silver" debts among traders and other entrepreneurs were not subject to these debt jubilees. Rulers recognized that productive business loans provide resources for the borrower to pay back with interest, in contrast to consumer debt. This was the contrast that medieval Schoolmen later would draw between interest and usury.

Yet for thousands of years, economic polarization was reversed by cancelling debts and restoring land tenure to smallholders who cultivated the land, fought in the army, paid taxes and/or performed corvée labor duties.

The basic principle that should guide economic policy is recognition that debts which can't be paid, won't be. The great political question is, how won't they be paid?

If debts are not written down, they will expand and become a lever for creditors to pry away land and income from the indebted economy at large. That is why debt cancellations to save rural economies from insolvency were deemed sacred from Sumer and Babylonia through the Bible.

A false alarm is sounded that government budget deficits will increase consumer prices — with no discussion of how private-sector credit deflates economies. The problem is that credit is debt — and paying debt service to bankers and bondholders (and various grades of loan sharks) leaves less income available to spend on goods and services. So debt deflation is today's major problem, not inflation.

Popular morality blames victims for going into debt – not only individuals, but also national governments. The trick in this ideological war is to convince debtors to imagine that general prosperity depends on paying bankers and making bondholders rich – a veritable Stockholm Syndrome in which debtors identify with their financial captors.

When the volume of debt has grown as large as national income or GDP, and when it bears an interest rate (typically 5%) above the economy's rate of growth (typically just 1% to 2%), then all the growth in national income is taken by the creditors.

In fact, they are not taught in any university departments: the dynamics of debt, and how the pattern of bank lending inflates land prices, or national income accounting and the rising share absorbed by rent extraction in the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector. There was only one way to learn how to analyze these topics: to work for banks. Back in the 1960s there was barely a hint that these trends would become a great financial bubble.

Debt leveraging is a major reason why the United States and Britain have lost their industrial advantage. Debt-inflated costs for housing, education and other basic needs have priced their labor out of markets abroad and at home.

The euro and the ECB were designed in a way that blocks government money creation for any purpose other than to support the banks and bondholders. Their monetary and fiscal straitjacket obliges the eurozone economies to rely on bank creation of credit and debt. The financial sector takes over the role of economic planner, putting its technicians in charge of monetary and fiscal policy without democratic voice or referendums over debt and tax policies.