Debt, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Deadlines
Student Loan Moratorium to end August 31
The oldest written record of a cuneiform transcription is a debt cancellation (Ama-gi law) by Enmetena,1 ruler of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash, c. 2400 BC, (Original in the Louvre.) 2
Debt has been a feature of civilization for thousands of years.3
Charles Dickens. and Debt
Debt was a major influence on the writing of Charles Dickens. His father was imprisoned for debt in 1824. His wife and all but one of his children joined him in the Marshalsea debtors' prison. Twelve-year-old Charles was put to work to pay off the debts. Drawing on his considerable and unhappy experience of the Marshalsea, Dickens makes his most telling allusions to debtors' prisons in The Pickwick Papers (1836), David Copperfield (1849), and Little Dorrit (1857). 4
Dostoevsky and Debt
Debt was also a major characteristic of Fyodor Dostoevsky's life. In Crime and Punishment the main character, Raskolnikov, kills a pawnbroker. A new book, The sinner and the saint: Dostoevsky and the gentleman murderer who inspired a masterpiece, includes detail on the debt prisons and system of debt in Imperial Russia that provide the context. 5
Another book, Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia: Debt, Property, and the Law in the Age of Dostoevsky and Tolstoi recreates the world of borrowers, bankrupts, lenders, and loan sharks in imperial Russia from the reign of Nicholas I to the period of great social and political reforms of the 1860s. 6
Student loan debt is in the news.
Student loan debt is in the news. At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Department of Education froze all federal student loan payments and interest from accruing. While interest rates for federal student loans are effectively down to zero during the moratorium, they will return to normal once payments resume after Aug. 31.
Will there be Ama-gi?
Kramer, Samuel Noah (1971). The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character. University of Chicago Press. p. 316.
Michael Hudson. 1993. THE LOST TRADITION OF BIBLICAL DEBT CANCELLATIONS
GRAEBER, DAVID. 2021. (expanded from 2011) DEBT: the first 5,000 years. MELVILLE HOUSE.
Allingham, Philip V. (2021). Debtors in Charles Dickens's Life and Work. The Victorian Web.
Birmingham, Kevin, and Robert Petkoff. 2021. The sinner and the saint: Dostoevsky and the gentleman murderer who inspired a masterpiece. Penguin.
Antonov, Sergei. 2016. Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia: Debt, Property, and the Law in the Age of Dostoevsky and Tolstoi. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press..
I see you cite to Michael Hudson. He fleshed out his work on ancient debt in "Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure, and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year" (2018) for you or anyone who is interested.
The theme is that beyond mathematical demonstrations of how compound interest always results in debt crisis, you need wise leaders in charge to control banking. So to your question about anyone canceling student debt any time soon, the answer is no.
There is an entire library that can be written on the Obama Administration's handling of the GM bankruptcy. It turned two centuries of bankruptcy practice on its head. Bankruptcy is supposed to protect creditors first, which is essential to the business of loaning money. Interrupt that, and commerce grinds to a halt.