Die Schulden und die ökonomische Logik

No subject in the world creates more confusion than ‘debt.’ Nowhere there is a greater need for information because no subject is more important for economic policy – and especially for European economic policy. Many people speak about indebtedness without making clear whose debts they mean, to who debtors are indebted and which assets they refer to. At the end, it often sounds as if the whole world is somehow over-indebted. The problem is that analysis is often based on gross debt, i. e. one adds up all debts of people and all sectors. This is from the outset a problematic approach. The reason is that because you set off all net debts and liabilities of all sectors in the world against one another, there is no debt (i. e. financial assets and financial liabilities net to zero). This cannot be otherwise on logical grounds. The world as a whole never has debt. For every liability, there is an identical claim and vice versa. The task of economists is to shed light on the development of net debt of the different sectors of the economy and to explain the channels through which the demand gap created by net savings is closed by indebtedness of other sectors. The paradox of neoliberalism lies in the fact that more and more government debt is needed to do this.