The bank's product is debt, because the banks want to make sure that they can get paid for the debt. But ultimately the only party that can pay the debt is the government, because it runs the printing presses. So the debts ultimately either are paid by the government, or they're paid by a huge transfer of property from debtors to creditors - or, the debts are written off.

There are many ways to create economic suicide on a national level. The major way through history has been through indebting the economy. Debt always expands to reach a point where it cannot be paid by a large swathe of the economy. This is the point where austerity is imposed and ownership of wealth polarizes between the One Percent and the 99 Percent.

Textbooks don't teach people how to avoid paying any income tax. But that's what an army of tax lawyers and corporate tax accountants do.

The problem is indeed that one party's debt finds its counterpart in some other party's savings. Not paying debts therefore involves annulling some other party's financial claims on the debtor.

Oil now, as a result of the Saudi production, is priced so low that there are not going to be new fracking investments made. A lot of companies that have gone into fracking are heavily debt-leveraged, and are beginning to default on their loans. The next wave of defaults that banks are talking about is probably going to be in the fracking industry. When the costs of production are so much more than they can end up getting for the oil, they just stop producing and stop paying their loans.

I don't think that governments should permit speculation in raw materials, because they're what the economy basically needs.

The Eurozone die is cast. Countries must withdraw from the euro so that governments can create their own money once again, and resist creditor demands to carve up and privatize their public domain.