Quotes About Debt

we have never been richer in the history of mankind. And we have never been more in debt

it had gotten France and Britain heavily in debt; they incurred at least ten times what they thought their financial costs would be

When you don't have debt you don't care about your reputation in economics circles—and somehow it is only when you don't care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just as in matters of seduction, people lend the most to those who need them the least.

Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles. Equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.

Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it's denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it's a structural one. We need rehab.

In the United States, we have a buildup of student loans that automatically transfer to these rent extractors. In a way it is no different from racketeering: one needs a decent university "name" to get ahead in life; but we know that collectively society doesn't appear to advance with organized education.

Human beings owe a debt of love to one another because there is no other method of paying the debt of love and care which all of us owe to providence.

No longer mindful of the debt they owed the Pokanokets, without whom their parents would never have endured their first year in America, some of the Pilgrims' children were less willing to treat Native leaders with the tolerance and respect their parents had once afforded Massasoit.

For every letter of creditors, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you'll be saved.

BILLS! BILLS! BILLS!' she screamed. 'IS THAT ALL YOU CAN BRING ME? THESE BILLS?' 'Yes, mam, that's all I can bring you.' I turned and walked on. It wasn't my fault that they used telephones and gas and light and bought all their things on credit. Yet when I brought them their bills they screamed at me - as if I had asked them to have a phone installed, or a $350 t.v. set sent over with no money down.

Greece, whose prior government had hired Goldman Sachs to help it massage its national accounts and conceal its budget deficits from the European Union, could no longer pay its $300 billion in government debt.

Money. An instrument invented in ancient temple complexes, to keep track of debt: counters that acquired mobility and went a-walking, weaving webs of debt into vast and intricate meshes, enslaving and directing the labor of billions in service of the obligations created by its issuance. . . . Money: a shadow play projected on the walls of our minds by the dark sun of debt.

Only debt is forever.

As the old saying had it, if you owe the bank ten thousand pounds, you have a problem; if you owe the bank ten million pounds, the bank has a problem; and if you owe the bank ten billion pounds, the Chancellor had a problem.

Just as individuals age and die, so do lineages: Only debt is forever.

Death is really no more than the voluntary liquidation of an economy of microscopic free agents, the redemption of the debt of structured life.

The child is demanding maintenance payments from me, backdated nearly twenty years, on the grounds that the undead are jointly and severally liable for debts run up by their incarnations. It's a legal precedent established to prevent people from committing suicide temporarily as a way to avoid bankruptcy.

We will just resent whatever cost and inconvenience the regulations impose, totally unaware that those precautions may have prevented a debt crisis or a real estate crash.

were a lot of bad actors). Let's start at the bottom: too many people borrowed too much money to buy real estate.

The typical real estate purchase was far more leveraged than the stocks purchased on margin in the run up to the 1929 crash. Putting 5 percent down on a house means the other 95 percent is borrowed.

U.S. military spending, which consumes half of all discretionary spending, has had a profound social and political cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debt threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick, and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering is the price for victory, which is never finally defined or attainable.

Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing products. It is created by manipulating the prices of currencies, stocks, and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.

There are huge misconceptions about people on benefits. They are labelled scroungers or cheats. The reality is that many who need that level of support are working, but their income is not enough to get out of debt or pay for basics like food and household bills. It's so close to the way I grew up.

If a debt crisis results from government profligacy and mismanagement, rather than from a market failure, it is true that the central bank should not intervene.