Calculating the Debt Gap

Using the debate over Scottish independence as a case study, this article analyses how calculating creditworthiness—or “sovereign risk”—has increasingly become the investment yardstick used by the political class to chart the limits to national self‐determination. In considering other species of predatory lending—municipal debt and household debt‐the article also charts the migration of the so‐called “debt trap” from Southern countries to the North over the last decade. It assesses the progress of advanced societies towards a state of creditocracy, in which the goal of the creditor class is to wrap debt around every social good, generating long‐term income streams and repayment obligations that are unsustainable in a functional democracy. The conclusion argues that debt refusal is a legitimate method of salvaging popular democracy.