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Healthy Money Healthy Planet - library.uniteddiversity.coop

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the interest­based system, the creation of new loans must always outpace the<br />

repayment of loans, or the system will collapse.<br />

There is no debt spiral. Borrowers only borrow money on the basis that they<br />

expect their incomes to rise sufficiently to be able to repay it, plus interest,<br />

partly through the returns they expect to make on their ‘real’ investments. If<br />

the returns on their ‘real’ investments are greater than the interest rate they<br />

are paying on their borrowings, then their debt will actually decline as a<br />

proportion of their income, not spiral at all.<br />

It is important here to think in terms of populations of debtors, not just<br />

individual debtors. It is true that for many individual borrowers there is no<br />

debt spiral. However, epidemiologists, who study the incidence and causes of<br />

disease, regularly have to explain to the public that one cannot generalise from the<br />

individual to the whole.<br />

As a group, debtors will continually owe more and more money; they can’t<br />

repay both the capital and the interest on the loan without incurring more debt.<br />

The system must always have its losers, and as a result there is a debt spiral of<br />

total debt.<br />

People need to think in terms of whole systems. The money system is really like<br />

a game of musical chairs in which there are always fewer chairs than there are<br />

people to sit on them. In musical chairs everyone knows the rules of the game,

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