Debt = Serfdom

Debt-serfdom and the dominance of Financial Power are two sides of the same coin.

Let's be clear about three things:

1. Too Big to Fail financialization is the metastasizing cancer that has crippled democracy and capitalism.

2. Financialization feeds on expanding debt and cannot survive without it.

3. Debt is serfdom. I have covered this in depth for years:

The New Road to Serfdom: A Negative-Equity Mortgage (May 9, 2006)
The Company Store, Debt and Serfdom (October 24, 2008)
Debt-Serfdom Is Now the New American Norm (October 18, 2011)
The Origins of American Debt-Serfdom (October 19, 2011)
EU Fiscal Union = EU Debt Serfdom (December 7, 2011)
Debt Serfdom in One Chart (May 4, 2012)
By Incentivizing Debt, We've Guaranteed Debt-Serfdom and Stagnation (June 12, 2012)
The Road to Debt-Serfdom (January 25, 2013)

There are three key dynamics to debt-serfdom:

A. The serf is never free of debt, i.e. he/she is programmed to being indebted for life.

B. Most of the serf's income is devoted to servicing debt.

C. Most of the debt is unproductive: marginal-utility college education, needless auto loan, leveraged McMansion that loses value in the inevitable speculative bust, and so on.
There are many ways to state these fundamentals and shelfloads of books have been written to describe the many mechanisms of financialization and serfdom, but we can summarize the dynamics in a few additional points:

More