Sandy Brian Hager > Quotes

“The public debt initially served to bolster the war-making prowess of states in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, governments borrowed to develop massive public works projects, including railways and canals. It was only in the twentieth century that the public debt was “discovered” as a key tool of macroeconomic policy and crisis management.”
― Sandy Brian Hager, Public Debt, Inequality, and Power: The Making of a Modern Debt State