After
having tried all the sources of this file I find it has disappeared. Perhaps it
told to much truth.
Reviews
Ashby Bladen, former columnist Forbes Magazine
Albert Friedberg has performed a real service in unearthing and
republishing this unnoticed gem. Freeman Tilden was a man of classical
education and historical insight, which most professional economists
emphatically are not. Writing on the eve of the Keynesian revolution, Tilden
emphasized many ancient truths that economists have insisted ever since are
fallacies, but the veracity of which we are presently seeing demostrated once
again. As a post-Keynesian financier I would not wish to be quite as
straight-laced as Tilden is. But it is daily becoming more difficult to dispute
his conclusion: "Once introduce the notion that in contracting a debt, the
debtor has thereby added something to his own or to the community's wealth, and
you have created a labyrinth into which a million optimists are eager to flock,
but out of which most of them will stumble, sooner or later, disillusioned,
seedy and sullen."
Tilden makes with admirable
clarity the point that civilization depends upon the framework of orderly and
reliable expectations provided by the general observance of contractual
obligations, so that political abrogations of debts tend to destroy the fabric
of civilization itself. He also deals with the wiping out of the real value of
debts through ruinous inflation, which in the past was the result of war or
deliberate governmental fraud. But the specific threat we face today is a new
twist upon these ancient practices. It is that national governments, strengthened
by the centralizing consequences of two world wars and terrified by the growing
danger of a return to the deflation and depression of the 1930's, will use the
credit of the sovereign state to guarantee all the private liabilities, and
bail out all the overextended debtors, whose collapse would otherwise be likely
to bring deflation and depression upon us once again...
Mr. Friedberg, in his
concluding Commentary For The Eighties, makes some suggestions... [H]is basic
principle is to reduce the reliance upon political guarantees of the
liabilities of financial institutions to a point at which the concern of
depositors and other individual creditors for the safety of their funds once
again forces a prudent self-discipline upon the lending policies of those
institutions. With that, I heartily agree.
Book Description
Published in 1935,
at the depth of the Depression, A World in Debt is a powerful indictment of the
debt system. Is is written in eloquent but non-technical language with profuse
use of clasical sources. With a foreword and a commentary by Albert D.
Friedberg, the republisher, a noted currency and commodities analyst and
seculator.
About the Author
Freeman Tilden,
1883-1980
But I have few surgestions
more that are not on Internet.