Famous Debt Quotes

Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republi­can) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 198os, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.

The human eye is restricted to see the useen, because there’s a price to be paid to the rulers of this image and if this image is seen by you, you’ll dare not divulge it to others, for others must pay a price

Keynesian orthodoxy started from the assumption that capitalist markets would not really work unless capitalist governments were willing effectively to play nanny: most famously, by engaging in massive deficit “pump-priming” during downturns.

John Wesley’s famous sermon on fasting: First, let it be done unto the Lord, with our eye singly fixed on Him. Let our intention herein be this, and this alone, to glorify our Father which is in heaven; to express our sorrow and shame for our manifold transgressions of His holy law; to wait for an increase of purifying grace, drawing our affections to things above; to add seriousness and to obtain all the great and precious promises which He hath made to us in Jesus Christ. . . . Let us beware of fancying we merit anything of God by our fasting. We cannot be too often warned of this; inasmuch as a desire to “establish our own righteousness,” to procure salvation of debt and not of grace, is so deeply rooted in all our hearts. Fasting is only a way which God hath ordained, wherein we wait for His unmerited mercy; and wherein, without any desert of ours, He hath promised freely to give us His blessing.1

Steamboat Willie put Walt Disney on the map as an animator. Business success was another story. Disney’s first studio went bankrupt. His films were monstrously expensive to produce, and financed at outrageous terms. By the mid-1930s Disney had produced more than 400 cartoons. Most of them were short, most of them were beloved by viewers, and most of them lost a fortune. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs changed everything. The $8 million it earned in the first six months of 1938 was an order of magnitude higher than anything the company earned previously. It transformed Disney Studios. All company debts were paid off. Key employees got retention bonuses. The company purchased a new state-of-the-art studio in Burbank, where it remains today. An Oscar turned Walt from famous to full-blown celebrity. By 1938 he had produced several hundred hours of film. But in business terms, the 83 minutes of Snow White were all that mattered.

The great irony, then, is that the nation’s most famous modern conservative economist became the father of Big Government, chronic deficits, and national fiscal bankruptcy. It was Friedman who first urged the removal of the Bretton Woods gold standard restraints on central bank money printing, and then added insult to injury by giving conservative sanction to perpetual open market purchases of government debt by the Fed. Friedman’s monetarism thereby institutionalized a régime which allowed politicians to chronically spend without taxing. Likewise, it was the free market professor of the Chicago school who also blessed the fundamental Keynesian proposition that Washington must continuously manage and stimulate the national economy. To be sure, Friedman’s “freshwater” proposition, in Paul Krugman’s famous paradigm, was far more modest than the vast “fine-tuning” pretensions of his “salt-water” rivals. The saltwater Keynesians of the 1960s proposed to stimulate the economy until the last billion dollars of potential GDP was realized; that is, they would achieve prosperity by causing the state to do anything that was needed through a multiplicity of fiscal interventions. By contrast, the freshwater Keynesian, Milton Friedman, thought that capitalism could take care of itself as long as it had precisely the right quantity of money at all times; that is, Friedman would attain prosperity by causing the state to do the one thing that was needed through the single spigot of M1 growth.

broad-based tax cut . . . accommodated by a program of open market purchases . . . would almost certainly be an effective stimulant to consumption.... A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.... Of course . . . the government could . . . even acquire existing real or financial assets. If . . . the Fed then purchased an equal amount of Treasury debt with newly created money, the whole operation would be the economic equivalent of direct open market operations in private assets.

ELDRIDGE CLEAVER (1953-I998) was a man who made a a significant imprint on our times, and not for the best. But I mourn his passing nonetheless. I first met Eldridge when he was Ramparts magazine's most famous and most bloodthirsty ex-con. 'I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist," he wrote in a notorious epistle that Ramparts published. "My answer to all such thoughts lurking in their split-level heads, crouching behind their squinting bombardier eyes, is that the blood of Vietnamese peasants has paid off all my debts." This nihilism became an iconographic comment for the times, a ready excuse for all the destructive acts radicals like us went on to commit.

Mia shook her head in exasperation as she felt Sirius take one hand while Remus took the other. "Mother of Merlin, how am I going to live with the two of you?" They led her through the opening into the Alley, where she was grateful to not hear that many people nearby. All she needed now was to wake up with her photo in the Daily Prophet, Sirius and Remus being suspected of witch-napping or worse. "I think we'll all get along famously," Sirius said, gently touching her elbow as he helped direct her over the cobblestones without falling. "Any problems we have, a few Silencing Charms can easily fix; isn't that right, Moony?" "Not sure why you'd even bother," Remus said with a chuckle. "Any noises Mia makes, I've already heard in abundance.

The demographic ageing of Europe and other leading industrial countries is multiplied by the economic burden of immigration. For the time being, we can still hold out, but this will not last. The lack of active workers, the burden of retirees and the expenses of healthcare will end, from 2005-2010, with burdening European economies with debt. Gains in productivity and technological advances (the famous ‘primitive accumulation of fixed capital’, the economists’ magic cure) will never be able to match the external demographic costs. Lastly, far from compensating for the losses of the working-age native-born population, the colonising immigration Europe is experiencing involves first of all welfare recipients and unskilled workers. In addition, this immigration represents a growing expense (insecurity, the criminal economy, urban policies, etc.). An economic collapse of Europe, the world’s leading commercial power, would drag down with it the United States and the entire Western economy.

Thich Nhat Hanh shares this Mahayana philosophy of non-dualism. This is clearly demonstrated in one of his most famous poems, “Call Me By My True Names:”1 Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow– even today I am still arriving. Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. I am still arriving, in order to laugh and to cry, in order to fear and to hope, the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of every living creature. I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I am the bird, that swoops down to swallow the mayfly. I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond, and I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog. I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands, and I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to my people, dying slowly in a forced-labor camp. My joy is like spring, so warm that it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast that it fills up all four oceans. Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one. Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up and open the door of my heart, the door of compassion. (Nhat Hanh, [1993] 1999, pp. 72–3) We

Of course, in the end a sense of mutual understanding isn’t enough. After all, talk is cheap; like any value, empathy must be acted upon. When I was a community organizer back in the eighties, I would often challenge neighborhood leaders by asking them where they put their time, energy, and money. Those are the true tests of what we value, I’d tell them, regardless of what we like to tell ourselves. If we aren’t willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all. By these standards at least, it sometimes appears that Americans today value nothing so much as being rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time. And yet a part of us knows better. We hang on to our values, even if they seem at times tarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives, we have betrayed them more often than we care to remember. What else is there to guide us? Those values are our inheritance, what makes us who we are as a people. And although we recognize that they are subject to challenge, can be poked and prodded and debunked and turned inside out by intellectuals and cultural critics, they have proven to be both surprisingly durable and surprisingly constant across classes, and races, and faiths, and generations. We can make claims on their behalf, so long as we understand that our values must be tested against fact and experience, so long as we recall that they demand deeds and not just words. To do otherwise would be to relinquish our best selves.

The mixture of a solidly established Romance aristocracy with the Old English grassroots produced a new language, a “French of England,” which came to be known as Anglo-Norman. It was perfectly intelligible to the speakers of other langues d’oïl and also gave French its first anglicisms, words such as bateau (boat) and the four points of the compass, nord, sud, est and ouest. The most famous Romance chanson de geste, the Song of Roland, was written in Anglo-Norman. The first verse shows how “French” this language was: Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes, set anz tuz pleins ad estéd en Espaigne, Tresqu’en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne… King Charles, our great emperor, stayed in Spain a full seven years: and he conquered the high lands up to the sea… Francophones are probably not aware of how much England contributed to the development of French. England’s court was an important production centre for Romance literature, and most of the early legends of King Arthur were written in Anglo-Norman. Robert Wace, who came from the Channel Island of Jersey, first evoked the mythical Round Table in his Roman de Brut, written in French in 1155. An Englishman, William Caxton, even produced the first “vocabulary” of French and English (a precursor of the dictionary) in 1480. But for four centuries after William seized the English crown, the exchange between Old English and Romance was pretty much the other way around—from Romance to English. Linguists dispute whether a quarter or a half of the basic English vocabulary comes from French. Part of the argument has to do with the fact that some borrowings are referred to as Latinates, a term that tends to obscure the fact that they actually come from French (as we explain later, the English worked hard to push away or hide the influence of French). Words such as charge, council, court, debt, judge, justice, merchant and parliament are straight borrowings from eleventh-century Romance, often with no modification in spelling. In her book Honni soit qui mal y pense, Henriette Walter points out that the historical developments of French and English are so closely related that anglophone students find it easier to read Old French than francophones do. The reason is simple: Words such as acointance, chalenge, plege, estriver, remaindre and esquier disappeared from the French vocabulary but remained in English as acquaintance, challenge, pledge, strive, remain and squire—with their original meanings. The word bacon, which francophones today decry as an English import, is an old Frankish term that took root in English. Words that people think are totally English, such as foreign, pedigree, budget, proud and view, are actually Romance terms pronounced with an English accent: forain, pied-de-grue (crane’s foot—a symbol used in genealogical trees to mark a line of succession), bougette (purse), prud (valiant) and vëue. Like all other Romance vernaculars, Anglo-Norman evolved quickly. English became the expression of a profound brand of nationalism long before French did. As early as the thirteenth century, the English were struggling to define their nation in opposition to the French, a phenomenon that is no doubt the root of the peculiar mixture of attraction and repulsion most anglophones feel towards the French today, whether they admit it or not. When Norman kings tried to add their French territory to England and unify their kingdom under the English Crown, the French of course resisted. The situation led to the first, lesser-known Hundred Years War (1159–1299). This long quarrel forced the Anglo-Norman aristocracy to take sides. Those who chose England got closer to the local grassroots, setting the Anglo-Norman aristocracy on the road to assimilation into English.

You’ve probably heard the stories about lottery winners losing it all. They’re not urban legends; they really happen. The depths people fall to after big lottery winnings are heartbreaking and mindboggling. And it isn’t only lottery winners. You’ve also heard the stories about famous movie stars, recording stars, or star athletes who make incredible fortunes, literally hundreds of millions of dollars, and somehow manage to wind up broke and in debt. And when you heard those stories, you probably thought the same thing I did: “Man, I don’t know how they pulled that off, but if I made that kind of money I sure wouldn’t squander it all like that!” But let me ask you a tough question: are you sure about that? Speaking as one who’s made it to the top and then seen it all evaporate, all I can say is, you might be surprised. There’s a reason those lottery winners lose it all again, a reason those shining stars plummet to those dark places: they may have had the big breaks, but they didn’t grasp the slight edge. Their winnings changed their bank account balance—but it didn’t change their philosophy. The purpose of this book is to show you the slight edge philosophy, show you how it works, give you plenty of examples, and show you exactly how to make it a core part of how you see the world and how you live your life every day. Throughout this book, if you look carefully you’ll find dozens of statements that embody this philosophy, statements like “Do the thing, and you shall have the power.” Here are a few more examples that you’ll come across in the following pages: Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do.

She was not alone. “There’s a definite panic on the hip scene in Cambridge,” wrote student radical Raymond Mungo that year, “people going to uncommonly arduous lengths (debt, sacrifice, the prospect of cold toes and brown rice forever) to get away while there’s still time.” And it wasn’t just Cambridge. All over the nation at the dawn of the 1970s, young people were suddenly feeling an urge to get away, to leave the city behind for a new way of life in the country. Some, like Mungo, filled an elderly New England farmhouse with a tangle of comrades. Others sought out mountain-side hermitages in New Mexico or remote single-family Edens in Tennessee. Hilltop Maoists traversed their fields with horse-drawn plows. Graduate students who had never before held a hammer overhauled tobacco barns and flipped through the Whole Earth Catalog by the light of kerosene lamps. Vietnam vets hand-mixed adobe bricks. Born-and-bred Brooklynites felled cedar in Oregon. Former debutants milked goats in Humboldt County and weeded strawberry beds with their babies strapped to their backs. Famous musicians forked organic compost into upstate gardens. College professors committed themselves to winter commutes that required swapping high heels for cross-country skis. Computer programmers turned the last page of Scott and Helen Nearing’s Living the Good Life and packed their families into the car the next day. Most had no farming or carpentry experience, but no matter. To go back to the land, it seemed, all that was necessary was an ardent belief that life in Middle America was corrupt and hollow, that consumer goods were burdensome and unnecessary, that protest was better lived than shouted, and that the best response to a broken culture was to simply reinvent it from scratch.

The Greek word for ‘self-control’ comes from a root word meaning ‘to grip’. It calls for getting a grip on your spending so that you don’t go into debt for things you don’t need and can’t pay for. It calls for getting a grip on your temper and not saying things you’ll later regret: ‘Better … a man who controls his temper than one who takes a city’ (Proverbs 16:32 NIV 1984 Edition). It calls for getting a grip on your desires. If Joseph had failed to say no to the repeated advances of his boss’ wife, he’d never have seen his life’s dream fulfilled and sat on the throne of Egypt. Understand this: Satan has discerned your destiny and he’s out to stop you from reaching it. So pray for self-control, and practise it on a daily basis.

debt. Perhaps we should start by giving it another name. The national debt is nothing like household debt, so using the word debt just leads to confusion and unnecessary angst. We could just refer to it as part of our net money supply. I doubt yellow dollars will catch on, but hey, it’s worth a shot! In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet famously inquires, “What’s in a name?” She wasn’t troubled when she learned that Romeo was a Montague. For her, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Love, as they say, is blind. On the political stage, words matter. It’s time to come up with a new name for these interest-bearing dollars.

because "Gresham's Law" proves that "bad money drives out good" from circulation. Hence, the free market cannot be trusted to serve the public in supplying good money. But this formulation rests on a misinterpretation of Gresham`s famous law. The law really says that "money overvalued artificially by government will drive out of circulation artificially undervalued money." Suppose, for example, there are one-ounce gold coins in circulation. After a few years of wear and tear, let us say that some coins weigh only .9 ounces. Obviously, on the free market, the worn coins would circulate at only ninety percent of the value of the full-bodied coins, and the nominal face-value of the former would have to be repudiated. If anything, it will be the "bad" coins that will be driven from the market. But suppose the government decrees that everyone must treat the worn coins as equal to new, fresh coins, and must accept them equally in payment of debts. What has the government really done? It has imposed price control by coercion on the "exchange rate" between the two types of coin. By insisting on the par-ratio when the worn coins should exchange at ten percent discount, it artificially overvalues the worn coins and undervalues new coins. Consequently, everyone will circulate the worn coins, and hoard or export the new. "Bad money drives out good money," then, not on the free market, but as the direct result of governmental intervention in the market.

Most people have no true concept of what debt and money really is.

The British bankers at that time also controlled the fledgling American banks which offered to loan Abraham Lincoln money to fight the war. Lincoln wisely refused and created the famous Lincoln greenbacks with which he financed the Civil War.38 Abraham Lincoln, in a famous address, declared: “At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up among us, it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die of suicide.” 39 Lincoln’s refusal to finance the Union through debt to the internationalists demonstrated his keen insight into their strategy for global dominion. Hence, he financed the Civil War by printing the Lincoln greenbacks. In both respects—with regard to the Civil War and the British bankers’ attempt to seize control of the economics of America—once again the aims of the globalists were frustrated. This is what caused Lincoln’s assassination. Nonetheless, America remained in control of her own credit. The result of this victory was low interest loans for entrepreneurs, which led to great business expansion. This great expansion in the post-Civil War era enhanced the fears of those who sought to bring the world into a One World Order. If America was allowed to continue to expand, she would be a major—perhaps insurmountable—obstacle in the way of their goal. For one hundred years, America was able to avoid total control of her capital by the international bankers. Lincoln was most certainly a great irritant and obstacle to the aspirations of the globalists. He was the last president to seek categorically a halting of the globalists’ drive toward a Global One World Government. It cost him his life; he was murdered by John Wilkes Booth, also an agent of the internationalists.40 America’s emergence from the Civil War as a great industrial power was due to the effective centralization of capital and credit within the Federal Government, thanks to Lincoln. It was America’s control over her own capital that was making her prosperous. It was the aim of the international bankers to change all that. Lincoln was the victim of a major conspiracy—a conspiracy so important that even the European bankers were involved. Lincoln had to be eliminated because he dared to oppose their attempt to force a central bank on the United States. He became an example to those who would later oppose such machinations in high places. Could it be that, one hundred years later, John F.

Old people vote. You know who votes in the swing states where this election will be fought? Really old people. Instead of high-profile videos with Cardi B (no disrespect to Cardi, who famously once threatened to dog-walk the egregious Tomi Lahren), maybe focus on registering and reaching more of those old-fart voters in counties in swing states. If your celebrity and music-industry friends want to flood social media with GOTV messages, let them. It makes them feel important and it’s the cheapest outsourcing you can get. Just don’t build your models on the idea that you’re going to spike young voter turnout beyond 20 percent. The problem with chasing the youth vote is threefold: First, they’re unlikely to be registered. You have to devote a lot of work to going out, grabbing them, registering them, educating them, and motivating them to go out and vote. If they were established but less active voters, you’d have voter history and other data to work with. There are lower-effort, lower-cost ways to make this work. Second, they’re not conditioned to vote; that November morning is much more likely to involve regret at not finishing a paper than missing a vote. Third, and finally, a meaningful fraction of the national youth vote overall is located in California. Its gigantic population skews the number, and since the Golden State’s Electoral College outcome is never in doubt, it doesn’t matter. What’s our motto, kids? “The Electoral College is the only game in town.” This year, the Democrats have been racing to win the Free Shit election with young voters by promising to make college “free” (a word that makes any economic conservative lower their glasses, put down the brandy snifter, and arch an eyebrow) and to forgive $1.53 trillion gazillion dollars of student loan debt. Set aside that the rising price of college is what happens to everything subsidized or guaranteed by the government.17 Set aside that those subsidies cause college costs to wildly exceed the rate of inflation across the board, and that it sucks to have $200k in student loan debt for your degree in Intersectional Yodeling. Set aside that the college loan system is run by predatory asswipes. The big miss here is a massive policy disconnect—a student-loan jubilee would be a massive subsidy to white, upper-middle-class people in their mid-thirties to late forties. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t try to appeal to young voters on some level, but I want them to have a realistic expectation about just how hard it is to move those numbers in sufficient volume in the key Electoral College states. When I asked one of the smartest electoral modeling brains in the business about this issue, he flooded me with an inbox of spreadsheets and data points. But the key answer he gave me was this: “The EC states in play are mostly old as fuck. If your models assume young voter magic, you’re gonna have a bad day.

Fear is historically the strongest emotion in economics. Remember FDR in the Great Depression? It's the most famous quote in financial history: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." In fact fear is probably the strongest human emotion, period. Who ever woke up at four in the morning because they were feeling half?

Bill Wilson would never have another drink. For the next thirty-six years, until he died of emphysema in 1971, he would devote himself to founding, building, and spreading Alcoholics Anonymous, until it became the largest, most well-known and successful habit-changing organization in the world. An estimated 2.1 million people seek help from AA each year, and as many as 10 million alcoholics may have achieved sobriety through the group.3.12,3.13 AA doesn’t work for everyone—success rates are difficult to measure, because of participants’ anonymity—but millions credit the program with saving their lives. AA’s foundational credo, the famous twelve steps, have become cultural lodestones incorporated into treatment programs for overeating, gambling, debt, sex, drugs, hoarding, self-mutilation, smoking, video game addictions, emotional dependency, and dozens of other destructive behaviors. The group’s techniques offer, in many respects, one of the most powerful formulas for change. All of which is somewhat unexpected, because AA has almost no grounding in science or most accepted therapeutic methods. Alcoholism, of course, is more than a habit. It’s a physical addiction with psychological and perhaps genetic roots. What’s interesting about AA, however, is that the program doesn’t directly attack many of the psychiatric or biochemical issues that researchers say are often at the core of why alcoholics drink.3.14 In fact, AA’s methods seem to sidestep scientific and medical findings altogether, as well as the types of intervention many psychiatrists say alcoholics really need.1 What AA provides instead is a method for attacking the habits that surround alcohol use.3.15 AA, in essence, is a giant machine for changing habit loops. And though the habits associated with alcoholism are extreme, the lessons AA provides demonstrate how almost any habit—even the most obstinate—can be changed.

In April 1814, just months before he penned his most famous words, he wrote to a minister friend, “When I thought a few years ago of preparing myself for the ministry, it seemed to me, from all the consideration I could give it, that I was peculiarly situated, & had entered, almost necessarily, into engagements that made such a step impossible. — At the same time I hoped (as I still do) that if the path of duty would lead me to this change of life, I should be enabled to see it, & that my present course should be stopped if I could serve God more acceptably in the ministry…I have doubts how far, even in this way, an abandonment of my profession could be reconciled with the necessities of my present arrangements. — I have been obliged to contract…a very considerable debt — and the relinquisment of my present pursuits would materially affect others…to whom I seem to have become bound…Under these circumstances you will perceive I ought not lightly nor without mature consideration, to make so important a change in my situation…. That I could support my family upon the terms you have mentioned I think probable: But I should find it difficult (if not impossible) to do more; and to do more I seem to be necessarily bound. Would it be practicable to make anything as an author of religious & Literary publications? And would I have any leisure for such engagements?

Faced with the enormous insult of his burial in Rome, the citizens of Florence finally realized their cultural and spiritual debt to Buonarroti. They hurriedly collected public donations to hire the services of Florence’s best burglars. The two thieves rode to Rome in an oxcart. After sundown, they broke into the church, stole the famous artist’s body, rolled it up with cords, and disguised it as a bale of rags. They put it in the back of the cart and rode like blazes back to Florence, arriving at dawn. The joyous Florentines immediately entombed their Michelangelo inside the Basilica of Santa Croce, where his tomb can still be seen today.

That's how I've felt about making this music, as an act of destroying myself, & for what, peoples mild amusement? longing for things to go wrong? fame & fortune? I'm not sure anymore. anything I do or say will be viewed by thousands of people, picked apart, criticised by people who think it's in any way at all important. It's hardly a spotlight, it's a magnifying glass under the sun. I never expected things to have been this way, when I was younger I wanted to be the next GG Alin, but more importantly, stay underground, stay unknown, & keep this as a hobby only, push the boundaries, piss people off, black metal aesthetic, etc. & anyone who questioned it can get the finger. But then I grew up, I matured, & saw the world differently, I changed. But the internet is the internet, & Ive been paying for those mistakes by the pound. These things I've done that I regret & have done my best to atone for, simply won't matter, not when people show no forgiveness & want nothing but blood to pay the debts. & blood is what they will get, & even then I'm not sure it will be enough. Even in saying this, even by coming back at all, It feels like I'm just lighting myself on fire & then watch all the moths come towards me. I sometimes get asked what's it's like to be famous, a thought which never occurs to me but whenever people ask I look at my numbers & realise how far I've come, & I don't feel pride, I feel paranoid, I feel threatened. that's how many people are watching you now. & every time I tell them the same thing. Don't ever be famous, It destroys you, I hate being me.

By these standards at least, it sometimes appears that Americans today value nothing so much as being rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time.

Express Empathy When Bill Clinton delivered his now-famous line “I feel your pain” in 1992, he did more than just clinch a victory over George H. W. Bush; he positioned himself as the guide in the American voters’ story. A guide expresses an understanding of the pain and frustration of their hero. In fact, many pundits believe Clinton locked up the election during a town hall debate in which Bush gave a rambling answer to a young woman when she asked what the national debt meant to the average American. Clinton countered Bush’s linear, cerebral answer by asking the woman if she knew anybody who’d lost their job. He asked whether it pained her that she had friends out of work, and when the woman said yes, he went on to explain how the national debt is tied to the well-being of every American, even her and her friends.5 That’s empathy. When we empathize with our customers’ dilemma, we create a bond of trust. People trust those who understand them, and they trust brands that understand them too. Oprah Winfrey, an undeniably successful guide to millions, once explained the three things every human being wants most are to be seen, heard, and understood. This is the essence of empathy. Empathetic statements start with words like, “We understand how it feels to . . .” or “Nobody should have to experience . . .” or “Like you, we are frustrated by . . .” or, in the case of one Toyota commercial inviting Toyota owners to engage their local Toyota service center, simply, “We care about your Toyota.” Expressing empathy isn’t difficult. Once we’ve identified our customers’ internal problems, we simply need to let them know we understand and would like to help them find a resolution. Scan your marketing material and make sure you’ve told your customers that you care. Customers won’t know you care until you tell them.

Apollo had become a trailblazer in the so-called “distress for control” market where it could buy up loans and bonds at steep discounts. When a troubled company restructured its debt, the paper that creditors had accumulated could then be swapped for stock in the reorganized company. If the company then turned around and improved, those credit investors who took on the risk could then make a windfall.

Crucially, most of the existing Harrah’s debt did not have to be refinanced. Because it was not secured by any collateral, suddenly Harrah’s could issue senior debt backed by the company’s assets. It would do so in the LBO deal, pushing $4.5 billion of existing debt to the bottom of the totem pole in a $25 billion debt stack. This was cruel. Those existing unsecured bonds crashed in price as they were last in line to be repaid. But the maneuver allowed Apollo and TPG to issue new debt more cheaply. And it illustrated one of the key legal principles that would echo through this case: Debtholders’ relationship with the company remains strictly contractual. Any rights they have must be bargained for and embedded in documents. The management and board of a company, in contrast, have fiduciary duties which dictate that they maximize shareholder value.

Don’t be afraid to borrow money to grow or buy a business. John D. Rockefeller did this with massive amounts. However, the key to this success is making sure you pay back all your debt. This is just good business.

Double-entry accounting was popularized in Europe toward the end of the fifteenth century, and most scholars believe it set the table for the flowering of the Renaissance and the emergence of modern capitalism. What is far less well understood is the why. Why was something as dull as bookkeeping so integral to a complete cultural revolution in Europe? Over nearly seven centuries, “the books” have become something that, in our collective minds, we equate with truth itself—even if only subconsciously. When we doubt a candidate’s claims of wealth, we want to go to his bank records—his personal balance sheet. When a company wants to tap the public markets for capital, they have to open their books to prospective investors. To remain in the market, they need accountants to verify those books regularly. Well-maintained and clear accounting is sacrosanct. The ascendance of bookkeeping to a level equal to truth itself happened over many centuries, and began with the outright hostility European Christendom had to lending before double-entry booking came along. The ancients were pretty comfortable with debt. The Babylonians set the tone in the famous Code of Hammurabi, which offered rules for handling loans, debts, and repayments. The Judeo-Christian tradition, though, had a real ax to grind against the business of lending. “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother,” Deuteronomy 23:19–20 declares. “In thee have they taken gifts to shed blood; thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbors by extortion, and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord God,” Ezekiel 22:12 states. As Christianity flourished, this deep anti-usury culture continued for more than a thousand years, a stance that coincided with the Dark Ages, when Europe, having lost the glories of ancient Greece and Rome, also lost nearly all comprehension of math. The only people who really needed the science of numbers were monks trying to figure out the correct dates for Easter.

The cancellation of inter-Ally war debts was designed to de-couple American finance from Europe. Keynes supported American loans to get European industry restarted, pay for essential food imports, and stabilize currencies. But he was adamantly opposed to Europeans borrowing from the United States to service deadweight debt. His book became an international best-seller, had a profound effect on post-war thinking, and made Keynes world-famous.

The most famous ruler of this period was Hammurabi, who lived circa 1810–1750 BCE. He is best known for the Code of Hammurabi—a set of laws inscribed on a black basalt pillar that now stands in the Louvre Museum. Hammurabi’s code specifies the rate of interest on silver at 20% and on barley at 33⅓%. What is most important about the code is not what is says but what it represents. The code is a uniform legal framework for the entire Babylonian empire. It covered everything from criminal law to family law, commercial practice to property rights. It details a range of punishments for transgressions, methods of dispute resolution, and attributions of fault for various offenses. It specifies the roles of judge, jury, witnesses, plaintiffs, and defendants. It recognizes and elaborates the rights of ownership of property, including rights to lease and rights of eminent domain. It specifies the role of the written document in a contractual obligation, the necessity of receipts, and what should be done if they do not exist. It specifies legal tender. It describes the obligations of merchants, brokers, and agents and their fiduciary duties and limits to their liabilities in case of attack or theft. It places limits on the term of debt indenture (three years). In short, it creates a comprehensive, uniform framework for commerce.

Although our feelings are not particularly fraternal, we give the people inhabiting this continent the national cognomen of "Brother Jonathan," while we name individuals "Yankees." We know that they are famous for smoking, spitting, "gouging," and bowie-knives—for monster hotels, steamboat explosions, railway collisions, and repudiated debts.

The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law that stipulated that all debts would be automatically cancelled “in the Sabbath year” (that is, after seven years had passed), and that all who languished in bondage owing to such debts would be released.

The painting is considered to have been very valuable to Vermeer, as he chose never to part with it or sell it, even when he was in debt. In 1676, his widow Catharina bequeathed the piece to her mother, Maria Thins, in an attempt to avoid the sale of the painting to satisfy creditors. The executor of Vermeer’s estate, the famous Delft microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek, determined that the transferral of the work to the late painter’s mother-in-law was illegal.

The same was true in Rome, where for a very long time Roman citizens not only paid no taxes but had a right to a share of the tribute levied on others, in the form of the dole—the “bread” part of the famous “bread and circuses.”53

Keith Hart, probably the best-known current anthropological authority on the subject, pointed this out many years ago. There are, he famously observed, two sides to any coin: Look at a coin from your pocket. On one side is “heads”—the symbol of the political authority which minted the coin; on the other side is “tails”—the precise specification of the amount the coin is worth as payment in exchange. One side reminds us that states underwrite currencies and the money is originally a relation between persons in society, a token perhaps. The other reveals the coin as a thing, capable of entering into definite relations with other things.

There’s a famous story that John and Lorna Marshall, who carried out a study of Kalahari Bushmen in the ’60s, once gave a knife to one of their favorite informants. They left and came back a year later, only to discover that pretty much everyone in the band had been in possession of the knife at some point in between. On the other hand, several Arab friends confirm to me that in less strictly egalitarian contexts, there is an expedient. If a friend praises a bracelet or bag, you are normally expected to immediately say, “Take it”—but if you are really determined to hold on to it, you can always say, “Yes, isn’t it beautiful? It was a gift.

Comte, a philosopher and political pamphleteer now most famous for having first coined the term “sociology,” went so far, by the end of his life, as actually proposing a Religion of Society, which he called Positivism, broadly modeled on Medieval Catholicism, replete with vestments where all the buttons were on the back (so they couldn’t be put on without the help of others).