Should we just excuse all international debt?

So the EU and the US can't seem to pay their bills, and it's quite likely China is cooking its books too. All that money has to be going somewhere, and be owed to someone.

So why not just excuse it all? Pull a modern-day Seisachtheia? What would be needed to do so?

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Because wars are often started by money. Some people/countries are greedier Loan Sharks than others.

More probably, it would result in a complete upheaval of the global economy. The industrialized nations can start anew at others' expense while the Third World is dumped into the dumpster and it impedes emerging but stable markets like India. The resulting chaos would more or less spark a mass Great Depression for a short term.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

For once, I agree with Tom.

This sounds like an absurdly horrible idea.

"Delenda est." "Furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed." -Common Roman saying at the end of speeches.

That's more a "reason people would try and stop this" rather than a "reason why it shouldn't be done." But I'll grant that; you'd need the U.S., Russia, China, and France on board at the very least. I'm not seeing this as a negative given how fucked up the global economy has been for decades, even before the start of this mess. Actually, most of the Third World would love to have its debts excused; there's a documentary called Life and Debt you might need to watch. And I highly doubt that India or Brazil are lending that much money to the likes of Greece or Jamaica, much less basing their economic growth upon them. Dude, with peak oil coming if not here already and the credit agencies holding most of the developed world hostage, we could be looking at that anyways. I'll take my odds on the debt excusing; it'd be an end to bailouts at least.

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As usual, its a big sweeping statement which fails to look at the full picture.

Now if you'd suggested that Greece ought to have its debt forgiven, and given reasons why that would help set the global economy straight, I might be more inclined to take this seriously.

And I seriously think forgiving 3rd World debt should be implemented, so those countries can actually begin to develop. This is why aid with strings attached is so damn horrible; I always groan when I hear the word "money was loaned to help with the X crisis."

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

I don't know how exactly this would work, do you just go up to your debtors and say "my bad, uh, let's just forget about the last thirty years, kay?"

Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?

Okay. Forgiving Greece's debt is all right? Who owns their debt?

And forgiving the developing world's debt sounds fantastic, by all means. But who owns their debt?

Now...why stop there? Why not excuse the U.S. and the E.U.'s debt? Who owns their debt?

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I think its their own internal creditors primarily, followed up mostly by China. EU countries tend to owe a lot of money to richer EU countries; i.e. France and Germany own a lot of the southern countries debt. Not sure how exposed Britain is. (Or France for that matter; I know Germany has been rumbling over it.)

edited 18th Sep '11 8:58:40 AM by GameChainsaw

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

Because it's not fucking fair to countries who have been responsible.

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

There's no such thing, so the point is moot.

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

Canada? Germany? Scandinavia?

edited 18th Sep '11 9:20:50 AM by Erock

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

It won't be fair to the countries that have been responsible when a global economic collapse drags them down anyways.

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What collapse? The global economy can't go much worse then it is now.

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

Oh, ye of little imagination...

^^ Oh yeah it can.

edited 18th Sep '11 9:24:09 AM by MajorTom

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

Please please please don't jinx it.

In all seriousness, yes it can.

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Only if China implodes.

Which it can.

edited 18th Sep '11 9:24:32 AM by Erock

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

@Erock: I think he meant that there ain't no such thing as fair.

I'm all for hitting the reset button, in theory. In practice however, you'd need to get every creditor to agree to this. or at least the major ones.

Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?

Correction, you'd need to get a majority of the world's governments on board.

Which leads to the much more difficult part of this topic: implementation.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

This is still a horible idea. The crditors would never agree to losing all that money.

If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.

And the Third World would be worse off. Their debts are quite literally the only reasons why some of them have business at all with the bigger players.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

Besides any other problems with this idea, I think the key point here is that you're saying that things will go bad if we cancel the debts, and also that they will go bad on their own even if we don't. So, from your perspective, why go to all the trouble of doing this, if things are just going to go to shit anyway?

edited 18th Sep '11 9:31:18 AM by ekuseruekuseru

I don't remember electing the creditors to a position of power in my country, nor giving them permission to hold the global economy hostage. It seems that they have been thus elected or empowered in any democratic country in the UN, to my knowledge. What business? Is this the business wherein the IMF locks them into "free-trade agreements" wherein their farmers are supposed to compete with the supersubsidized U.S. agriculture lobby, or where multinationals are free to pay their workers pennies on the dollar, and they can't afford to trade with their equally poor neighbours because their neighbours are as fucked as they are? Are you aware of the effects of our lending policies are on the Third World? Do you think foreign "investment" helps, or that the money "invested" goes to recipients of that country? More or less. I'm proposing a total reset of how we run international finance.

And to pre-empt the "then they'll all run up huge debts thinking they can get bailed out again!" argument: not what I'm describing. I'm not for bailing out, I'm for ignoring the debt outright, as though it were never accrued. The entire point of the exercise is to change how the economy works completely, to AVOID the situations in which nations end up like this at all.

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Let's implement a world government instead. Then there will be no such thing as "international" debt.

...I actually think that'd be a tougher political sell.

Regardless, if we continued to be owned by our internal creditors, a world government would not solve the problem, just consolidate it.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.