Conversation

Depends how much debt. You owe a million and the bank owns you. You owe $10 billion and you own the bank. They are dependent on you to not fail themselves. You can also really only lend to people you consider an equal; who has the potential to pay back debt. This has been reduced in the recent century to a credit score (and this is one of the problems with student debt; it doesn’t depend on any of those measures).

David Graber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years goes into a lot of this. I don’t agree with some of it the older I get (he was a commie-ish college professor) but the book still has some interesting points.