Sep
3
“The U.S., to be clear, has always had a debt, since 1776. The original Revolutionary War debt has never been repaid, and couldn’t be. The only person who made a serious effort to retire the debt was President Andrew Jackson. In order to do that he also had to get rid of the Bank of the United States, which was the equivalent of the Federal Reserve. As a result, basically, local banks had to take up the task of providing all the credit in the U.S. That caused incredible speculative bubbles, because there was no real control over how they would do that (one advantage of having a central bank is that you can keep an eye on it and make sure it doesn’t engage in completely inflationary policies). This led to the Panic of 1837 and a giant economic collapse. No one has tried to do it since.”
David Graeber (via azspot)
(via quotingthecrisis)
