The bureaucratic thicket of financialization helps fuzz out the underlying reality that there are significant costs to participating in society today (access to housing, energy, transport, internet/communications, education... most of which require taking on loans). The propensity for debt masks the severe lack of equity (literal financial equity, not just a lack of fairness) in access to resources. The credit system is then perfectly set up to enable cabals controlling access to extract rents while appearing polite. Sophisticated arm-breakers indeed.

Quite besides the abstract economic concerns which can be ameliorated by moving around numbers in ledgers, the true cost of a zombie economy is the tragedy of billions of human lives wasted away because of the (engineered) difficulty in integrating with society in a smooth manner. Makes one wonder whether there are good reasons why several cultures/religions forbade usury.