The Debt Crisis and possible mass default

Speaking at the Irish Funds Industry Association’s 2012 Annual Global Funds Conference 2012 in Dublin yesterday, Malmgren, who, among many other roles, has served as a financial markets adviser in the White House, explained that there were a number of ways in which governments are likely to default over the next decade.
“When I look around the world, the magnitude of the debt problem is so great that the vast majority of the debt will be defaulted upon,” said Malmgren

http://www.international-adviser.com/news/europe/irish-fa-president-predicts-worldwide-defaults

When one looks at the figures that's exactly what the maths would indicate. A mass default seems unthinkable, yet unthinkable things happen all the time in economics.

One thing I am sure of is that a lot of people don't feel morally bound by their debts any more. I don't think they ever did.

Borrowing money is something the wealthy will advocate in public, and warn against in private.

P.T. Barnum wrote in his “Art of Money Getting”

Young men starting in life should avoid running into debt. There is scarcely anything that drags a person down like debt. It is a slavish position to get in, yet we find many a young man, hardly out of his "teens," running in debt. He meets a chum and says, "Look at this: I have got trusted for a new suit of clothes." He seems to look upon the clothes as so much given to him; well, it frequently is so, but, if he succeeds in paying and then gets trusted again, he is adopting a habit which will keep him in poverty through life. Debt robs a man of his self-respect, and makes him almost despise himself. Grunting and groaning and working for what he has eaten up or worn out, and now when he is called upon to pay up, he has nothing to show for his money; this is properly termed "working for a dead horse. 

I underlined the phrase, “working for a dead horse”. I've come across this phrase a few times in 19th American writing. It means working for something you have already used, work for no reward. Maybe it was invented by someone who accidentally killed a horse and had to go to work to pay the owner for the lost chattel. I don't know. But I like the phrase.

If we are to pay back our debts, it means an awful lot of “working for a dead horse”.

Think that will fly at election time?