The Coming Savings Writedowns - Michael Hudson

But what of the asset side? One person's debt is a creditor's claim for payment. This is defined as "savings," even though banks simply create credit endogenously on their own computers without needing any prior savings. When debts can't be paid and debtors default, what happens to these creditors?

As President Obama showed, banks and bondholders can be bailed out by new Federal Reserve money creation. That is what the $4.6 trillion in Quantitative Easing since 2008 was all about. The Fed has spent the last few years supporting stock market prices (and holding down gold prices) by manipulating the forward option markets.

But this artificial life support to keep the debt overhead afloat is nearing the reality of the debt wall. The European Central Bank has almost run out of available euro-bonds to buy. The new fallback position to keep the increasingly zombified U.S. and Eurozone financial markets afloat is to experiment with negative interest rates.