I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Get yourself out of debt. Do whatever it takes. Get yourself out of debt ... If like most people you feel the pressure of being in debt, get out of it ... If you’ve got credit cards, cut ’em up! ... Cut ’em up! Get rid of ’em. Don’t feed the system. Don’t feed the system. Work in cash as much as possible, and don’t use these loyalty cards – it’s all geared towards trying to create the social conditioning where they monitor behaviour; they’ve got the information going into the database – just think about what’s occurring. Ian R Crane, lecture Liverpool 2008, ‘New World Order’
What will happen when being in debt all the time is the normal way to live? James Burke, Connections s1e8: Eat, Drink and Be Merry, BBC 1978
Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people that they don’t like. Will Rogers
When you need to borrow money the Mob seems like a better deal I think. ‘You don’t pay me back I break both yer legs.’ Is that all? You won’t take my house or wreck my credit rating? Fine where do I sign. Legs? Fine. You don’t even have to sign anything. Craig Ferguson
She planted that terror of debt so deeply in her children that even now, in a changed economic pattern where indebtedness is a part of living, I become restless when a bill is two days overdue. Olive never accepted the time-payment plan when it became popular. A thing bought on time was a thing you did not own and for which you were in debt. She saved for things she wanted, and this meant that the neighbours had new gadgets as much as two years before we did. John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: ‘I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.’ Mark Twain, The Gilded Age
Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It’s a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can’t get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt, it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy. Noam Chomsky
Never Never Nation. The Independent headline
The banks have made a killing in the decade of the ’80s. They’ve been crying the whole time but not only the banks but the public institutions have received a total of over $1.3 trillion ... And the reward the debtor countries have received for paying their creditors $1.3 trillion in the last ten years is to be 60% more in debt than they were in 1982. So if there is no change, this can go on for ever. Dr Susan George, author The Debt Boomerang
Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing. Ralph M Hawtrey
What Mr Rothschild had discovered was the basic principle of power, influence, and control over people as applied to economics. That principle is, When you assume the appearance of power, people soon give it to you.
Mr Rothschild had discovered that currency or deposit loan accounts had the required appearance of power that could be used to induce people (inductance, with people corresponding to a magnetic field) into surrendering their real wealth in exchange for a promise of greater wealth (instead of real compensation). They would put up real collateral in exchange for a loan of promissory notes. Mr Rothschild found that he could issue more notes than he had backing for, so long as he had someone’s stock of gold as a persuader to show his customers.
Mr Rothschild loaned his promissory notes to individuals and to governments. These would create overconfidence. Then he would make money scarce, tighten control of the system, and collect the collateral through the obligation of contracts. The cycle was then repeated. These pressures could be used to ignite a war. Then he would control the availability of currency to determine who would win the war. That government which agreed to give him control of its economic system got his support.
Collection of debts was guaranteed by economic aid to the enemy of the debtor. The profit derived from this economic methodology made Mr Rothschild all the more able to expand his wealth. He found that the public greed would allow currency to be printed by government order beyond the limits (inflation) of backing in precious metal or the production of goods and services.
In this structure, credit, presented as a pure element called ‘currency’, has the appearance of capital, but is in effect negative capital. Hence, it has the appearance of service, but is in fact, indebtedness or debt. It is therefore an economic inductance instead of an economic capacitance, and if balanced in no other way, will be balanced by the negation of population (war, genocide). The total goods and services represent real capital called the gross national product, and currency may be printed up to this level and still represent economic capacitance; but currency printed beyond this level is subtractive, represents the introduction of economic inductance, and constitutes notes of indebtedness.
War is therefore the balancing of the system by killing the true creditors (the public which we have taught to exchange true value for inflated currency) and falling back on whatever is left of the resources of nature and regeneration of those resources.
Mr Rothschild had discovered that currency gave him the power to rearrange the economic structure to his own advantage, to shift economic inductance to those economic positions which would encourage the greatest economic instability and oscillation. Bill Cooper, Top Secret: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, Operations Research Technical Manual TM-SW7905.1
A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit. Arnold H Glasow
Extreme Makeover: Credit Bureaus, Often Feared, Are Now Selling Themselves as the Consumer’s Best Friend. For many years, consumers viewed the nation’s three big credit bureaus as shadowy and vaguely threatening, about as friendly as the IRS or a debt-collection agency. News article Christopher Conkey
Take thou no usury of him, or increase: but fear thy God; that thy brother may live with thee.
Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase. Leviticus 25:36&37
At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release.
And this is the manner of the release: Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbour, or of his brother; because it is called the Lord’s release. Deuteronomy 15:1&2
Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury:
Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury: that the Lord thy God may thou goest to possess it.
When thou shalt vow a vow unto the Lord thy God, thou shalt not slack to pay it: for the Lord thy God will surely require it of thee; and it would be sin in thee. Deuteronomy 23:19-21
An entire shopping culture had been built around credit. Jacques Peretti, The Men Who Made Us Spend III, BBC 2014
Now we’re a nation of shoppers. ibid.
In the mid-1980s, the giant investment house, Merrill Lynch, contracted two different firms to clean and guard their headquarters in New York’s financial district .... They held credit cards with which they could enter any financial institution and withdraw $52,000 on any one occasion, no questions asked. The Nigerian cleaners and night watchmen busied themselves for several months photocopying all these details on the company Xerox, before transferring the information onto blank credit cards in preparation for one might spending spree. Misha Glenny, McMafia
One night the Nigerians let down their guard and left one of the photocopied pages by the machine. ibid.
And now this had happened – to plunge them back into that abyss of wretchedness from which they had so recently escaped. They still owed several weeks' rent, and were already so much in debt to the baker and the grocer that it was useless to expect any further credit. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
Owen used to wonder how they managed to continue to exist. Most of them were wearing other people’s cast-off clothes, hats, and boots, which had in some instances been given to their wives by ‘visiting-ladies’, or by the people at whose houses their wives were to work, charring. As for food, most of them lived on such credit as they could get. ibid.
Buy today, pay tomorrow, how much do you owe? What’s it’s like being in debt? Patrolling the front line. And can natural born spenders become savers? Tonight: Buy Today, Pay Tomorrow? ITV 2017
Households which are borrowing more than a billion pounds a month … whether Britain is heading for a new credit crunch. ibid.
The greatest credit bubble in history. Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve, 2013