Banks as Collateral Damage in a Class War

Re:Banks as Collateral Damage in a Class War by js8 on Wednesday March 22, 2023 @10:29AM (#35261583)

Actually, Michael Hudson argued that even Sumerians knew that, so they had a debt jubilee everytime a king has died (and from that comes the phrase "clean slate"). Despite all the technology, we are not really much smarter today.

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Re:Banks as Collateral Damage in a Class War by prottog on Wednesday March 22, 2023 @10:32AM (#35261624)

> so they had a debt jubilee everytime a king has died

From this I can gather that Sumerian kings on average didn't live very long. ;-)

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Re:Banks as Collateral Damage in a Class War by whitemary on Wednesday March 22, 2023 @11:21AM (#35262420)

Or they were a good king and didn't let debt build up.

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Re:Banks as Collateral Damage in a Class War by green_man_lives on Wednesday March 22, 2023 @10:49AM (#35261897)

I would assume that most of the early Mesopotamian societies were the same. IOUs were the first form of currency, used for trade and bookkeeping. But after a while you'd see consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few, which would have been antithetical to the everything they knew at the time (group > individual).

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Re:Banks as Collateral Damage in a Class War by ineedasername on Wednesday March 22, 2023 @11:26AM (#35262518)

I imagine that a spasm of anxiety went through every lender’s gut whenever a king so much as sneezed.

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Re:Banks as Collateral Damage in a Class War by ajmurmann on Wednesday March 22, 2023 @11:40AM (#35262773)

So I would only get a mortgage when the king is young? I assume interest rates would go up with the age of the king?

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