[Fresh Ink] [Review] Margaret Atwood's "Payback"

[Richard Menec]

New York Review of Books
Volume 56, Number 6 · April 9, 2009

The Way of All Debt
By John Gray

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
by Margaret Atwood
Toronto: House of Anansi
230 pp.
$15.95 (paper)

A perturbation arising from the American market in subprime mortgages has
spread through the banking system to disrupt economic activity throughout
the world. The pattern of cause and effect will be debated for many years,
with historians asking when and how the global economy was set on the path
that led to its current condition. Already there are some who trace the
crisis to decisions of Alan Greenspan, chairman of the board of governors of
the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, when he responded to events such as
the collapse in the late 1990s of a hedge fund, Long Term Capital
Management, and the subsequent bursting of the dot-com bubble by creating a
climate of easy borrowing, which in turn inflated another bubble in the
housing market.

Others suggest that a change in the legal system of banking brought about by
the repeal in 1999 of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had aimed to
limit speculation by separating commercial and investment banking, created
an environment that allowed reckless lending. Yet others explain the turmoil
in world markets as a symptom of an endemic instability in the type of
finance capitalism that has developed in America, Britain, and some other
Western countries.

These accounts are not mutually exclusive, nor are they in any way
exhaustive. Like most of the narratives that offer to tell us how the world
arrived at its present pass, they are primarily economic in focus. To be
sure, this is an economic crisis; it might therefore seem to follow that it
is best explained in economic terms. But economics may not give a
satisfactory understanding of the events of the past year. The changes that
have occurred are not only in the world economy. They include shifts in
geopolitics, involving aspects of the rise and fall of nations that go
beyond their economic performance, and an erosion of values.

The dislocation that is being produced by the financial crisis affects
political and moral beliefs that have supported capitalism in the past.
Market economies are not underpinned chiefly by economic theories. They rely
for their legitimacy and continued functioning on ideas about right and
wrong, fairness in society, and orderliness in the world. In the boom years
many of these ideas were discarded as erroneous or redundant. Now that the
boom has been followed by bust it may be useful to reexamine ideas about
debt, and consider how they may fare as governments use all the instruments
at their disposal to avert a slide into depression.

One of the many impressive features of Margaret Atwood's new book is its
almost eerie timeliness. Consisting of five chapters that were broadcast in
November 2008 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as the Massey
Lectures, a series intended to provide a radio venue for the exploration of
important issues, Payback appeared in print last October. The book must have
been written some months earlier, but there is no sign that it was composed
in haste. Atwood examines the role of ideas of debt in religion, literature,
and society; she discusses the nature of sin, the structure of plot in
fiction, the practice of revenge, and the ecological payback that occurs
when human beings take from the planet more than they return. A celebrated
novelist, poet, and critic, Atwood has combined rigorous analysis,
wide-ranging erudition, and a beguilingly playful imagination to produce the
most probing and thought-stirring commentary on the financial crisis to
date.

Full:
http://tinyurl.com/d7gcmx