>What was the exact figure Jeffrey Sachs cited in a recent NYT editorial?
>That the stock market wealth created in the last 5 years in the rich
>countries is 60x the debt owed by all Sub Saharan Africa?
>
>rnb
>
It would seem to me that no new wealth can actually be "created" by the speculative exchange of paper, as opposed to the production of real physical wealth created by human labor, i.e. the production of capital goods. However, the debt extracted from regions like Sub Saharan Africa has real physical consequences in that capital is allocated for debt service which could have been used to create real wealth or improvements in the standard of living -- like basic health care. I read something not long ago which detailed the plight of the (literally) millions of Third World children who die every year of simple preventable diseases like cholera, where the cure (basically aspirin, antidiuretics like Pepto, and fresh water) costs only a few dollars, but is unavailable due to lack of capital. Yet any Third World leader who declared a debt moratorium in order to provide for the basic needs of his/her people would undoubtedly be labeled a "nationalist extremist" and a pretext would be thought up to remove him/her.