Actually, that is exactly how it has worked in the past:
"We have built the most incredible economic machine the world has ever seen. But now we need a rest. Over the past quarter of a century, we have created a seemingly unlimited number of new products and services, but now we are beginning to run out of markets. We have burned up credit, and generated debt beyond all belief, and now we must get rid of it somehow. Historically, it has never been possible to pay back all the debt after a long wave peak. It must be wiped out either by price deflation and default or by further currency depreciation, and ultimately the introduction of a new currency. The process is as old as history. For instance in Biblical times there was a jubilee every 50 years when all debts were forgiven. In the seventh century B.C., after a roaring inflation caused by the importation of coins by the successful merchants of Athens, Solon the lawgiver issued his famed "Seisachtheia" or shaking off of burdens in which the mortgage pillars symbolizing debts, were torn down. Peasants who had pledged themselves into slavery to pay their debts—as was the custom at that time—were freed to start economic life anew, and new money was issued."
Julian Snyder (from his 1983 Introduction to The Long Wave Cycle, by Nikolai Kondratieff) |
