> Maybe I don't have a full understanding- but economywide, the amount of debt and savings has to be equal, right? Only if you assume the total amount of curr

> Maybe I don't have a full understanding- but economywide, the amount of debt and savings has to be equal, right? Only if you assume the total amount of currency in the system is fixed. If some of it gets destroyed (cash burned in fire) then you can easily have debt grow more than savings because the destruction of the currency doesn't destroy the debt. This also assumes that the debt has the same growth (interest) as the savings (also interest). If the debt has higher interest on it and isn't defaulted on, then the debt can also easily grow to above the level of savings. Now that happening does mean that the debt can't be paid off with savings as it is now, so you need to be able to generate enough value/profit/product to be able to keep paying the principle down and even though the savings isn't enough to wipe it out the debt still isn't necessarily uncontrollable. That said there's got to be a tipping point where you can no longer keep that up and there will eventually be no choice but to default on that debt and then all kinds of hell breaks loose because that hasn't happened very often in modern economies so nobody really knows how to handle it.