Debt

Debt  (obligation)
Interest of	• David Graeber • Institute of International Finance

Debt has been going on for about 5000 years.

US

The American Debt Slave-The Big Con

In 2017, research revealed that "The U.S. government pays professional debt collecting agencies, on average, nearly 40 times the value of what they collect".

Researchers have advanced debt as and explanation for the fact that "some 40% of Americans would struggle to come up with even $400 to pay for an unexpected bill."

 

Examples

Page name	Description
"Debt crisis"
French Covid debt commission	"We must reinvent a way of managing public finances after this brutal shock"
Greece/Debt crisis	The crisis over Greek sovereign debt which came to a head with the election of the Syriza Party to office in January 2015 and its refusal to accept EU Commission and ECB demands for further dramatic austerity measure on an already desperately impoverished population.
National debt
Wage slavery

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
COVID-19/Economy	“The IMF is explicit. In one of its lending windows, the Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust, which applies to pandemics, generously, "provides grants for debt relief to our poorest and most vulnerable members." Nonsensical statement: it is there to replenish the coffers of the creditors, the money is allocated to debt servicing.”	Michel Chossudovsky	17 April 2020
Enclosure	“The appropriation, by one means or another, of lands owned or occupied by the poor continues. What was accomplished in England by legislation is being accomplished today all over the world by bank-created capital and debt-finance.”	Ivo Mosley	2013
John Perkins	“My job was to convince heads of state of countries with resources our corporations covet, like oil, to accept huge loans from the World Bank and its sister organizations. The stipulation was that these loans would be used to hire our engineering and construction companies, such as Bechtel, Halliburton, and Stone and Webster, to build electric power systems, ports, airports, highways and other infrastructure projects that would bring large profits to those companies and also benefit a few wealthy families in the country, the ones that owned the industries and commercial establishments. Everyone else in the country would suffer because funds were diverted from education, healthcare and other social services to pay interest on the debt. In the end, when the country could not buy down the principal, we would go back and, with the help of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), “restructure” the loans. This included demands that the country sell its resources cheap to our corporations with minimal environmental and social regulations and that it privatize its utility companies and other public service businesses and offer them to our companies at cut-rate prices.”	John Perkins

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