Of course debt doesn't have "just" economic importance. As Brett Neilson argued a few years ago, it's become the bond of the national citizen:
"[W]ith the emergence of debt as a structural necessity in the lives of most people around the world, the relation between debt and guilt has been reversed. In the context of credit ratings, negative gearing, hedge funds and micro-credit, one is guilty if one is not in debt!
"This is not simply a matter of social control, although certainly the will-to-indebtedness inserts the subject in a complex matrix of databases. Debt and payback, borrowing and amortisation, also imply a certain rhythm, an obsessive sequencing that measures itself against the pace of life. ‘The rate of interest’, as economist John R. Hicks wrote, ‘is the price of time’.[2] Nobody ever hears the death (mort) in mortgage, but surely it is there.
[...]
"There is something in this moment of reversal, in which, to recall Nietzsche’s words again, ‘the creditor sacrifices himself for his debtor’, that registers the current realignment of debt and guilt in global finance capitalism. Yet the notion of a maxima culpa, guilt before God, does not capture the current absolution of debt from guilt. For what is unbearable about debt is certainly not that it can’t be repaid. Today, debt has no original sin. Instead of a maxima culpa, we face what might be called the minima moralia of debt. Loans are assumed not with the intention to repay but to refinance. Only the debt that cannot and will not be acquitted absolves us.
"Thus, the good citizen, whether he or she is an individual in a nation-state or a nation-state in the so-called ‘international community’, is an indebted subject. Indeed, debt insinuates itself in the very oscillation between citizen and subject.
[...]
"Debt here is the basis not only of individuality but also of citizenship, something that ‘all Australians should be able to aspire to’. And, in this sense, debt also imposes a kind of border, controlled by the device of the credit rating, which importantly is heightened not through the avoidance or refusal of debt but rather through the faithful repayment of that which will never be repaid. To cross the border established by debt, to bear the unbearability of debt, is to become a full member of the polity. To be in debt is not necessarily to own, but it is to belong.
"‘It is even part of my good fortune not to be a home owner’, wrote Nietzsche in The Gay Science.[12] Adorno remembers this in Minima Moralia: ‘Today we should have to add: it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home’.[13] In the current moment of financialisation, it is perhaps necessary to go beyond this ethical preoccupation. Today we should have to add: it is part of politics not to be at home in the oikos. It is not a matter of finding the great outside to debt, as if one could heed Nietzsche’s injunction to exist beyond, above or untouched by debt. Rather it is a matter of living despite debt – of refusing its time, its subjectivation, its measure. And this means unmasking the magic of debt, its smoke and mirrors. It means the invention of a politics in which labour reappears."