While I can appreciate where this is coming from, I can only help but thinking that this is a very poor short term solution. By debt cancelling I expect he mea

While I can appreciate where this is coming from, I can only help but thinking that this is a very poor short term solution. By debt cancelling I expect he means the government / the central bank will pay the lenders. (If not then we will have a massive homeless retirees problem as they are generally the lenders). As an economist, the issue with that is that it will continue incentivize the function of the underlying economic system and the problem will re-appear even faster. In the economic area mentioned by the author, housing, eduction, utilities, justice, it seems clear that if people need to get over-indebted to get basic services, there is a pricing issue. The problem come mostly because usual market arbitration forces are not applying in those areas because of asymetric needs of buyers and sellers. The average renter generally cannot avoid paying or use a subtitute and is generally forced to bear a price augmentation. If the government simply pays the sellers of those services, they have no incentive to provide them at a lower cost. So I believe it's really a pricing issue and only its resolution will allow to resolve the symptoms, debt and poverty, that it creates.