Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Updated And Explained by David Graeber

Chapter One 
ON THE EXPERIENCE OF MORAL CONFUSION 
debt 
• noun 1 a sum of money owed. 2 the 
state of owing money. 3 a feeling of 
gratitude for a favour or service. 
-Oxford English Dictionary 
If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If 
you owe the bank a hundred million 
dollars, you own the bank. 
-American Proverb 
TWO YEARS AGO, by a series of strange coincidences, I found myself 
attending a garden party at Westminster Abbey. I was a bit uncom-

fortable. It's not that other guests weren't pleasant and amicable, and 
Father Graeme, who had organized the party, was nothing if not a gra-

cious and charming host. But I felt more than a little out of place. At 
one point, Father Graeme intervened, saying that there was someone 
by a nearby fountain whom I would certainly want to meet. She turned 
out to be a trim, well-appointed young woman who, he explained, was 
an attorney-"but more of the activist kind. She works for a founda-

tion that provides legal support for anti-poverty groups in London. 
You'll probably have a lot to talk about." 
We chatted. She told me about her job. I told her I had been 
involved for many years with the global justice movement-"anti-

globalization movement," as it was usually called in the media. She 
was curious: she'd of course read a lot about Seattle, Genoa, the tear 
gas and street battles, but ... well, had we really accomplished any-

thing by all of that? 
"Actually," I said, "I think it's kind of amazing how much we did 
manage to accomplish in those first couple of years."

"For example?" 
"Well, for example, we managed to almost completely destroy 
the IMF." 
As it happened, she didn't actually know what the IMF was, so 
I offered that the International Monetary Fund basically acted as the 
world's debt enforcers-"You might say, the high-finance equivalent 
of the guys who come to break your legs." I launched into historical 
background, explaining how, during the '7os oil crisis, OPEC coun-

tries ended up pouring so much of their newfound riches into Western 
banks that the banks couldn't figure out where to invest the money; 
how Citibank and Chase therefore began sending agents around the 
world trying to convince Third World dictators and politicians to take 
out loans (at the time, this was called "go-go banking"); how they 
started out at extremely low rates of interest that almost immediately 
skyrocketed to 20 percent or so due to tight U.S. money policies in the 
early '8os; how, during the '8os and '9os, this led to the Third World 
debt crisis; how the IMF then stepped in to insist that, in order to 
obtain refinancing, poor countries would be obliged to abandon price 
supports on basic foodstuffs, or even policies of keeping strategic food 
reserves, and abandon free health care and free education; how all of 
this had led to the collapse of all the most basic supports for some of 
the poorest and most vulnerable people on earth. I spoke of poverty, 
of the looting of public resources, the collapse of societies, endemic 
violence, malnutrition, hopelessness, and broken lives. 
"But what was your position?" the lawyer asked. 
"About the IMF? We wanted to abolish it." 
"No, I mean, about the Third World debt." 
"Oh, we wanted to abolish that too. The immediate demand was 
to stop the IMF from imposing structural adjustment policies, which 
were doing all the direct damage, but we managed to accomplish that 
surprisingly quickly. The more long-term aim was debt amnesty. Some-

thing along the lines of the biblical Jubilee. As far as we were con-

cerned," I told her, "thirty years of money flowing from the poorest 
countries to the richest was quite enough." 
"But," she objected, as if this were self-evident, "they'd borrowed 
the money! Surely one has to pay one's debts." 
It was at this point that I realized this was going to be a very dif-

ferent sort of conversation than I had originally anticipated. 
Where to start? I could have begun by explaining how these loans 
had originally been taken out by unelected dictators who placed most 
of it directly in their Swiss bank accounts, and ask her to contemplate 
the justice of insisting that the lenders be repaid, not by the dictator,

Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Updated And Explained by David Graeber