Recently I read an article on the evils of debt which mentioned that in some early versions of the Lord's Prayer the request is not "forgive us our trespasses", but rather "forgive us our debt".
I tell a lie. The article wasn't really on the evils of debt. The actual title was "Repent at leisure" which left me a little bit in limbo as to just what the article was about. Reading on however, and given the fact that the subtitle had the word debt in it I assumed debt and repentence would turn out to be intricately bound to one another.
The author went on to describe how the use of debt to finance assets has been around for a very long time and strangely almost always reaches a point where the "pyramid" can no longer self-supporting and the whole artifice collapses in on itself.
He even goes so far as to describe rising levels of government debt as a Ponzi scheme "that requires an ever-growing population to assume the burden". Or default.
It is interesting. Generally we talk about the "R" word as if a recession were somehow not politically correct. I think it is only a matter of time before we start talking about the "D" word.
I could mean deflation-that's getting a lot of press lately and it is certainly intricately linked with debt. And then there is default. It is linked with debt, and through forced asset sales/liquidations, which, if left to it's own devices stimulates deflation, more asset sales, more deflation and presto, we have a default.
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