Experimenting with Debt Forgiveness in Iceland

Rejkjavik (photo from the Guardian)

As we start to read Graeber's Debt, here's a story from NPR on an interesting proposal for debt forgiveness of mortgage debt of homebuyers - debt that increased after Iceland's own financial crisis of 2008. We will see as we get further in the semester that the notion of debt forgiveness - or the Jubilee (after the biblical notion of universal debt forgiveness) - is crucial to the arch of Graeber's history of debt. Graeber proposes a Jubilee to the current rise in debt across the board. Iceland seems to be experimenting with putting this idea into practice.

http://www.npr.org/2014/12/11/370156273/iceland-experiments-with-a-jubilee-of-debt-forgiveness