I recommend you look into Modern Monetary Theory. It is an unideological look at how the monetary system works, starting with first principles. Its historical r

I recommend you look into Modern Monetary Theory. It is an unideological look at how the monetary system works, starting with first principles. Its historical roots lie in Functional Finance. The Pragmatic Capitalism blog has a nice intro here: http://pragcap.com/resources/understanding-modern-monetary-system http://pragcap.com/resources/understanding-modern-monetary-s... For more details, I recommend the blog of Bill Mitchell, especially his Debriefing 101 section: http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?cat=11 http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?cat=11 The brief answer to your question is that yes, money is always a zero-sum game, just by the definition of how accounting works. If you sum up all financial assets and liabilities over the entire world, they sum up to zero. Now when people say that a country is indebted, what they really mean is that its government is indebted. The corresponding financial assets are owned by the private sector. It's really as simple as that. That is why trying to pay down the government debt is such a stupid idea. All it does it attempt to force the private sector out of its financial assets. And as the communists learned the hard way, putting undue force onto the private sector against its natural behaviour usually leads to bad results.