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Lending weight It was the growing rate of default on home mortgages in America that precipitated the financial crisis five years ago. These delinquencies, although not enormous in themselves, became impossible for some investment banks to bear, thanks partly to their own heavy debts. As the contagion spread throughout the financial sector in 2007-08, nervous or cash-strapped banks and other creditors stopped lending, thereby infecting the rest of the economy. Deep recessions and big financial rescues them led to surge in government debt. That, in turn, raised fears about the solvency of various countries in euro area, culminating in Greece’s default in 2012. Debt was, then, both a cause and a consequence of the crisis, and remains a big reason for its continuance. Economists tend to see debt as useful means to get money where it is most needed, from creditors with an excess of it, to borrowers who are short of it. The broadening and deepening of international credit markets that preceded the financial crisis was considered a spur to growth, since it gave ever more borrowers access to bigger loans at lower rates of interest. When disaster struck, however, debt turned from a ladder into a chute. Working out what went wrong, and when debt turns dangerous, has become a preoccupation of economics in recent years. Debt is possibly the oldest financial instrument, older even than money. Archaeologists have unearthed Babylonian tablets of sun-dried clay recording obligations incurred in the third millennium before Christ. But despite its venerability, debt is not much respected. In German, the word for debt (Schuld) also means sin (a view that many Germans still seem to hold). Those who run up debts are assumed to be profligate and those who chase them down mercenary and unfeeling. That is because debt is a peculiarly unforgiving instrument: it must be paid in full and on time, come what may. That distinguishes debt from some other financial liabilities, such as shares, whi