Where has all the money gone and why do we care?
So here’s my question- and please be gentle as I know very little about economics- is where has all the money gone, and why do we care?
Let me explain; most people I know owe a little money, either on credit cards, or mortgages, or student loans, or whatever. But all the people who they owe this money to (the banks, the government) owe a lot of money. We keep being told how much money everyone owes. The country owes a lot of money; presumably to banks, who also owe a lot of money. The Americans owe a ridiculous amount of money. Greece owes more money than it can perhaps pay back to all the other people that owe money.
So where is all this money? Is it sitting in some vault in china somewhere? Or is there some kind of hilarious mistake where somebody’s missed a few zeros off in some computer code somewhere. And if nobody has any money (Except the chinese), why does it matter? Why do we not all get together and say, right, let’s start again, everybody has zero debt, and china can go worry about itself. SUre, it would cause some problems, but we could stop talking about how much everyone owes all the time.
Originally published at Ben Parker's Blog. You can comment here or there.