Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'debt'

August 25, 2010

Forms of ‘Financial Oppression’

From Marketwatch today, “Morgan Stanley warns on sovereign defaults”: “Outright sovereign default in large advanced economies remains an extremely unlikely outcome,” they said. But bondholders could suffer losses from forms of “financial oppression,” such as repaying debt with devalued currency, the analysts warned. Continue Reading...
May 25, 2010

Debt, Welfare and the Road to Serfdom

Simon Johnson and Peter Boone wrote an interesting article the UK Telegraph Saturday called “The New Feudal Overlords of Europe will be the bankers of the ECB.” Johnson is also the co-author along with James Kwak of a thoughtful and provocative book 13 Bankers as well as a blog on economics. Continue Reading...
May 13, 2010

Debt, Credit and the Virtuous Life

This week’s Acton Commentary: Our economic life is concerned with more than just the objective exchange of goods and services. Far from being morally neutral, it is an expression of how we understand our dependence on God and neighbor and is the means by which we fulfill, or not, our obligations toward them. Continue Reading...
February 20, 2009

Dave Ramsey’s Financial Ministry

Thanks to Clear Channel Radio, I was able to attend Dave Ramsey’s event in Grand Rapids last night. I used to listen to Ramsey on the radio quite a bit as a seminary student in Kentucky and I was always impressed by how much he was inspiring American families to live within their means and become better financial stewards of their resources and income. Continue Reading...
June 16, 2008

Encouraging a true culture of thrift

Picking up on themes we’ve touched on here, here, and here, last week NYT columnist David Brooks weighed in on the culture of debt in the United States. “The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined,” he writes. Continue Reading...
June 03, 2008

Is this capitalism?

Is this supposed to be capitalism? Geoff Colvin writes that a motivating factor in the recent crash in corporate profits, as well as the sharp decline in home values, was the phenomenon that “people began to believe that the more they borrowed, the better off they would be. Continue Reading...