Quantitative Easing for the Public

= aka the Modern Debt Jubilee

Discussion

Steve Keen:

"The stan­dard means of reduc­ing debt—personal and cor­po­rate bank­rupt­cies for some, slow repay­ment of debt in depressed eco­nomic con­di­tions for others—could have us mired in delever­ag­ing for one and a half decades, given its cur­rent rate.

We should, there­fore, find a means to reduce the pri­vate debt bur­den now, and reduce the length of time we spend in this dam­ag­ing process of delever­ag­ing. Pre-cap­i­tal­ist soci­eties insti­tuted the prac­tice of the Jubilee to escape from sim­i­lar traps (Hud­son 2000; Hud­son 2004), and debt defaults have been a reg­u­lar expe­ri­ence in the his­tory of cap­i­tal­ism too (Rein­hart and Rogoff 2008). So a prima facie alter­na­tive to 15 years of delever­ag­ing would be an old-fash­ioned debt Jubilee.

But a Jubilee in our mod­ern cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem faces two dilem­mas. Firstly, in any cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem, a debt Jubilee would paral­yse the finan­cial sec­tor by destroy­ing bank assets. Sec­ondly, in our era of secu­ri­tized finance, the own­er­ship of debt per­me­ates soci­ety in the form of asset based secu­ri­ties (ABS) that gen­er­ate income streams on which a mul­ti­tude of non-bank recip­i­ents depend, from indi­vid­u­als to coun­cils to pen­sion funds.

Debt abo­li­tion would inevitably also destroy both the assets and the income streams of own­ers of ABSs, most of whom are inno­cent bystanders to the delu­sion and fraud that gave us the Sub­prime Cri­sis, and the myr­iad fias­cos that Wall Street has per­pe­trated in the 2 decades since the 1987 Stock Mar­ket Crash. We there­fore need a way to short-cir­cuit the process of debt-delever­ag­ing, while not destroy­ing the assets of both the bank­ing sec­tor and the mem­bers of the non-bank­ing pub­lic who pur­chased ABSs. One fea­si­ble means to do this is a “Mod­ern Jubilee”, which could also be described as “Quan­ti­ta­tive Eas­ing for the pub­lic”." (http://www.profstevekeen.com/modern-debt-jubilee/?)