Showing posts with label interest payments. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interest payments. Show all posts

Monday, September 2, 2019

2/9/19: One view of Austerity


A picture is worth a thousand words, some say. So here is a picture of austerity we've had (allegedly) in recent decades:


Source: @Soberlook 

The things are savage: debt is up from ca 70% to over 110%. Cost of debt carry is down from just under 4% to under 1.75%. So where are all those fabled public investments? And who has benefited from this massive increase in debt? Virtually all - financialized (a nice euphemism for being absorbed into financial assets valuations). Austerity, after all, is just the old-fashioned transfer of resources from the broader economy to the select few, made more palatable by the superficially low cost of borrowing.