Yet it is important to remember that debts and obligations shape economic prospects and life possibilities in even more fundamental ways. In the most elementary sense, debts enable economic activity by liberating present resources from the most immediate pressures of productivity or profitability. Brenner’s account makes clear that this enabling capacity of debts, tapped ever more desperately throughout the long downturn, has been squandered: the mass of unproductive debts on the supply side has been greatly augmented by a new mass of unproductive debts on the demand side. Insofar as all those debts will be held and enforced by a class of creditors keen to preserve the prerogatives of free-ranging capital, the only economic trend that seems certain to continue is the ongoing transfer of wealth to those who already have a lot of it. Meanwhile the basic political function of public debt—channeling resources toward socially necessary investments—has been redefined as a subsidy program to increase the power of the private sector. [...]