The Gillray cartoon speaks to our times, showing the wealthy (George III and William Pitt) raking in the cash. So far, so obvious.
Margaret Thatcher was an ideologue, her faith was monetarism and against all reason she deregulated the markets during the 1980s. I have never bought the idea that markets mysteriously regulate themselves. Whatever Adam Smith meant by his invisible hand I am certain he didn't mean what we have seen over the last couple of decades.
All this is done in the name of freedom. We are all supposed to benefit from cheap credit. We have ended up with the bizarre spectacle that those who are poor appear rich and those who are rich appear poor.
How so? If you buy on credit, you will have a decent house, car and clothes. So long as you can more or less earn enough to pay off the interest you seem not to be doing too badly. If you don't buy into this, you are bound to look shabbier. Some people of my generation remember thrift. I remember my father's advice, don't buy on credit. You are paying interest for no obvious reason, so you actually have less available funds in the long term. Why can't people see that?
Then there is the Jeffrey Archer paradox. If you are hundreds of pounds in debt, you are seriously in trouble. You will be hounded from pillar to post. Your gas and electric will be cut off. If you are tens of thousands in debt you might lose your house. If you are hundreds of thousands or millions in debt, a friend will loan you a nice room in Oxford so you can write a novel and pay your way out. If you are seriously in debt you are somehow a valued customer of the banks.
The persecution of the indebted poor is a major scandal. Often debt is not with the government or a 'reputable' High Street bank, but through loan sharks. They go door to door making loans to people the banks will not trust with small sums of money, making loans at extortionate interest rates. Small sums accumulate until many people find they no longer have any chance of repaying their accumulated debt. Banks have always been reluctant to make small loans because they cost too much to administer. Credit unions were developed as one way to address this need.
Credit unions and debt counselling can be a help although these days the sheer scale of debt raises questions about whether they can ever be repaid. Where interest rates are extortionate or debt has been generated without regard for a realistic repayment plan, one is inclined to wonder whether the loans and interest should be repaid.
In Bangladesh, Mohammed Yunus started the Grameen Bank which makes small mutual loans to, usually women, to start their own small businesses. This seems to have been phenomenally successful and has spread to other countries. There is a link in the left hand side bar to the New Economics Foundation blog, which describes new ideas for mutual approaches to economics.
But it is the world's poor that suffer because debt is simply a means to transfer money into the pockets of the wealthy and powerful. These days more of us are becoming the world's poor.
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