On Tue, 17 Jan 2012, Doug Henwood wrote:
> You know, I suspect that one reason that debt jubilees and the like are
> not spoken of now as compared with earlier periods might have something
> to do with the greater economic importance of debt. If debts are not
> central to the functioning of the real economy, they can be wiped away
> with little impact. Not so today.
The part of this that is really true is that in ancient times, debts had nothing to do with intermediation. They were owed directly by the workers to the aristocrats or the state. So when debts were forgiven, the aristocrats took a hit, but the effect on the real economy was all good, and immediate. It was literally a no-brainer. All you needed was power.
Whereas nowadays we have this vast complicated sticky web where every large scale write off sets off several huge and not entirely transparent chains of consequences. And where getting banks to make large scale social write offs immediatley creates a new problem of how to solve the problem of massive bank failures and attendant economic freeze-up. Which is not a problem the ancients had to solve.
Michael