As it stands, money never really sits around doing nothing. It's on some banks balance sheets and so it's loaned out, then repackaged and sold to organizations seeking safe places to park money. This repackaging of debt has been a huge boon to the US economy in the short term. But, it's only a long term gain if people actually default otherwise it's just a long term drain for a short term boon.

The wider problem is there is more 'money' than productive usage for that money which means bad loans, and wealth destruction. Arguably the solution is to have money sit around without being loaned out.

Firstly, the debt burden is only diffused because those "mustache twirling CEOs' decided it should be.

Pensions used to work just fine before they were financialised by sharks. So did insurance.

No one sane should be trying to increase the returns on a pension fund by gambling on student debt, on real estate loans, or on consumer credit.

That was exactly the approach that caused the implosion of 2008 - or more specifically, it was "mustache twirling CEOs" hiding the fact that the investments they were selling as a sure thing were junk loans with a cheap wood veneer.

Secondly, even if this wasn't true, the social and economic costs of an economy that runs on usury instead of productive investment are so predictably crippling that the hair cut, with associated uncontrolled demolition, will happen anyway.

A debt jubilee would do a lot to restore confidence, because everyone will be able to stop looking nervously at everyone else's obligations and wondering if they're going to be able to meet them. Instead, some realism will be restored to book values.

This would still be cataclysmic, because the financial industry needs to understand that it can no longer run on cocaine and bullshit.

But it won't be the financial equivalent of a self-inflicted nuclear strike, which is a real possibility as things stand today.