It all started in the 1960s. A small rectangle of plastic sold to us as a status symbol. ibid.
The UK’s total credit card debt now stands at £57 billion. ibid.
The shift back to cash is not what the banks and the credit card companies want. Nor were they expecting it. ibid.
The UK is in the grip of a cost of living crisis. In the last six months one in four people have borrowed money to pay for food and energy bills. With costs continuing to rise, many are finding themselves in debt for the first time. Dispatches: Broke: Britain’s Debt Emergency, Channel 4 2022
As families struggle to cope with the cost of living crisis, it’s believed that one million people are now borrowing money from illegal loan sharks. ibid.
Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people that they don’t like. Will Rogers
When you need to borrow money the Mob seems like a better deal I think. ‘You don’t pay me back I break both yer legs.’ Is that all? You won’t take my house or wreck my credit rating? Fine where do I sign. Legs? Fine. You don’t even have to sign anything. Craig Ferguson
She planted that terror of debt so deeply in her children that even now, in a changed economic pattern where indebtedness is a part of living, I become restless when a bill is two days overdue. Olive never accepted the time-payment plan when it became popular. A thing bought on time was a thing you did not own and for which you were in debt. She saved for things she wanted, and this meant that the neighbours had new gadgets as much as two years before we did. John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It’s a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can’t get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt, it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy. Noam Chomsky
Nobody had a credit card when I was a kid. No one had credit card debt. But these big companies and banks wanted to know how to get more money out of people – get them charging things. Michael Moore
It wasn’t until I stood in my truth and told everybody that I had $250,000 in credit card debt. At that point, everything turned around for me. I had to reveal the truth about what I didn’t have, more than pretend about what I did. That was interesting. Suze Orman
Credit cards act to obscure, reproduce, and exacerbate divisions of class, race, and gender by creating a credit relationship in which individuals and banks are paired in a patronizing, asymmetrical economy of debt. The illusion of choice and our own feelings of complicity hide the fact that debt is embodied domination, that the purpose of consumer credit is to keep you in debt perpetuity. You are not supposed to be able to pay enough to escape debt, but you are supposed to pay interest on time or be disciplined by higher interest, penalties, fees, and harping, dunning, threats, and infantilizing phone calls. Brett Williams, Debt for Sale
There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt. John Adams, 1735-1826
There is nothing left now for us but to get ever deeper and deeper into debt to the banking system in order to provide the increasing amounts of money that nation requires for its expansion and growth. Our money system is nothing better than a confidence trick. Dr Frederick Soddy, author Wealth, Virtual Wealth & Debt
Not one of them has paid me, bunch of parasites. It’s all because I’m a soft touch; I’m a fool for a hard luck story; I’m too nice for my own good. Anton Chekhov: Comedy Shorts: The Bear starring Julian Barratt & Julia David & Reece Shearsmith
Debt is the slavery of the free. Publilius Syrus
Debts and lies are generally mixed together. Francois Rabelais
Till thou hast paid the utmost farthing. Matthew 5:26
It is very iniquitous to make me pay my debts – you have no idea of the pain it gives me. Lord Byron
Dreading the climax of all human ills,
The inflammation of his weekly bills. Lord Byron, Don Juan
In the midst of life we are in debt. Ethel Watts Mumford et al, Altogether New Cynics Calendar 1907
Debt is a prolific mother of folly and of crime. Benjamin Disraeli
What most of the people in this country have become is food for the debt machine. Michael Ruppert, investigator & author
One of the greatest disservices you can do a man is to lend him money that he can’t pay back. Jesse H Jones
The only way out of a debt crisis is to deal with your debts. David Cameron
Never Never Nation. The Independent headline
Britain who had once been the world’s banker, we were now the world’s single biggest debtor nation ... He [Atlee] turned to the economist John Maynard Keynes and sent him to Washington ... No gift but a loan of just under four billion dollars, with interest, just half of what he thought was vital ... The last of that loan was finally paid off December 2006. Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain, BBC 2007
The credit card system as a whole is a huge threat to our freedom. But the really great threat isn’t so much these corporations as our nonchalance in the face of the power they have over us. It’s our indifference, our negligence, our ignorance, that gives them their power and makes them dangerous to us. Daniel Gross, computer database specialist
Avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt: not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertions in times of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burthen. George Washington
Only commercial banks and trust companies can lend money that they manufacture by lending it. Professor Irving Fisher, 100% Money 1935
Debt is the worst poverty. Thomas Fuller
Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis. Bill Bonner & Addison Wiggin, authors The New Empire of Debt
Too much debt: and if nobody in the government in either party is looking at solving the debt problem then the answer is it’s going to go into a depression as far as the eye can see. Professor Michael Hudson
Debt has become a part of who we are. Dave Ramsey
90% of marriages end on money problems. Dave Ramsey
A national debt, if it is not excessive will be to us a national blessing. Alexander Hamilton, American politician, letter to Robert Morris 30th April 1781
And to preserve their independence we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. Thomas Jefferson
Never spend your money before you have it. Thomas Jefferson
A mortgage casts a shadow on the sunniest hill. Robert Ingersoll
Speak not of debts unless you mean to pay them. George Herbert
A man in debt is so far a slave. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Debt is the fatal disease of republics: the first thing and the mightiest to undermine government and corrupt the people. Wendell Phillips
I must say, I never expected I would see the day where I would be talking about anything other than reducing the debt. I’m running into the tyranny of zero – which is where you can’t reduce [the debt] any longer. Alan Greenspan
The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default. Alan Greenspan
What will lift people out of poverty is not cancelling their debt but what policies their countries pursue. Stanley Fischer, IMF
The banks have made a killing in the decade of the ’80s. They’ve been crying the whole time but not only the banks but the public institutions have received a total of over 1.3 trillion dollars ... And the reward the debtor countries have received for paying their creditors 1.3 trillion dollars in the last ten years is to be 60% more in debt than they were in 1982. So if there is no change, this can go on for ever. Dr Susan George, author The Debt Boomerang
The environment is probably the major victim next to human beings of the debt crisis, if only because countries are obliged to cash in their resources. They must cut down their forests. They must dig up their minerals and ruin their land, producing cash crops to earn enough currency to keep on paying the debt. There is an almost perfect correlation between the top debtors and the top deforesters. There is a striking correlation. ibid.