Payback
Margaret Atwood
Bloomsbury, 9.99 pounds

In this uncannily timely book, Margaret Atwood zeroes in on a remark presumably uttered before the current financial crisis gathered all its fury with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in mid-September. “Debt is the new fat,” she quotes an acquaintance as saying, the words highlighting the conversational way of identifying the fashionable sin of the time. That personal remark telescopes the troubles cascading around the world, primarily on account of America’s and of Americans’ — perhaps of the West’s — inability to keep their borrowings in check.

And while this is not a financial take on the crisis, marking instead an interesting journey through myth, literature, philosophy and science to understand the idea of credit and fair exchange, some introductory statistics are useful. Atwood reminds us that the first credit card was issued in 1950. “In 1955, the average Canadian household debt-to-income ratio was 55 per cent; in 2003, it was 105.2 per cent. The ratio has gone up since then. In the United States, the ratio was 114 per cent in 2004. In other words, a great many people are spending more than they’re earning. So are a great many national governments.”

But is calculation of debt the preserve of financial folks alone? How deep need the preconditions of debt be? Or, as Atwood asks: “(A) friend of mine used to maintain that airplanes stayed up in the air only because people believed — against reason — that they could fly: without that collective delusion sustaining them, they would plummet to earth. Is ‘debt’ similar?”

... contd.