Remember the Victims of Debt

I have, from time to time, gone over my very generous overdraft because of people paying fees late or after the beginning of a month. At least I am not in the situation of many very junior barristers. The experience is not pleasant; collection departments, whilst courteous, tend to call until satisfied that they have acquired a guaranteed date for payment and to then send automatic letters that manage to threaten all sorts of things. For those in my position, a call and a note on a computer, followed by payment, works, and of course I have the money coming in.

However, some don't. It's all very well saying that people should be absolutely responsible for their own debts and that breaking one's word to personal financiers is a very bad thing. I could agree with those propositions in the abstract. I'm sure John Locke would be pleased at the integrity with which contract and absolute commitment are fetishised in America. How many readers who would, though, really know the sort of things that collections departments, usually outsourced, get up to in the united states and here?

Bear in mind, while you read, that the other side of the bargain by which people in Europe allowed the elevation of large oligopolistic banks was the way in which they occasionally reached out of their profits to allow concepts like unauthorised overdrafts, free cash machines, and repeatedly returned direct debits over the past fifteen years. They went easy on occasional trouble; the public went easy on their charges. Now, we stuff them with money, and they crack down on comparatively small debts via outsourced or financially harassed employees. That sound you hear is the breaking of a social contract.

Last Thursday saw a shocking AOL report on how people have been dogged for years by people who call their children, or track their houses down and hang around their streets in America. It also saw this disturbing tale of those who fall into the debt trap whilst having done, in their own eyes, everything right. I notice too that my old friend Daniel Margolin has been busy down the Royal Courts of Justice, having done 240 bankruptcy cases yesterday alone.

This is, of course, the way markets work. The west has been given over to a form of materialism in which getting on and getting by were largely characterised by credit-driven instruments the collapse of which falls upon those who used them rather than those who invented them. I can sit here, as I have been for the past few years, writing alarmist but ultimately correct pieces about how the economy was crashing and why (most of the time) and I can read elsewhere people who are comfortable who have written of 'necessary adjustments'.

Yet I know victims of that adjustment personally, and I overhear others all the time now in bars waiting for trains or on the trains or just out and about. The great movements of capital that are ongoing in this world--and which I think preparatory to a bigger crash even if we get off oil and onto coal and nuclear energy soon--have a human cost.

If you've read this far, I don't want to bring you down. I do want you to think about the desperate case for compassion and for a degree of economic realignment in this world though, so that selfishness and banks are not allowed to combine with cupidity in the way that they have for a long time to come. And spare a thought for those trapped by the 'miracle' of debt.