Creditor Rights Quotes
This is one of the earliest expositions of the legal and economic doctrine that if a borrower is made unable to pay the interest and principle of the loan by an act beyond anyone’s control. The obligation to pay for that year is cancelled. In modern times most cultures go the other way. When the banks caused the economic Meltdown of 2008, millions of Americans could not pay their loan obligations and mortgages. They received no relief whereas in the “primitive” world of 4,000 years ago they would have relief for that year. Note the subtle difference in Hammurabi {611462} where someone had prepaid and rented land for a year and the crop fails, and this situation where there is borrowed money.
There was, well before the American Revolution, a restriction on the importation of British goods into the American colonies. Partially this was to pressure Parliament to stop some of its most repressive lawmaking. But it also supported what had become a very lucrative protectionist monopoly of large American merchants. See {636861}.
With their slave labor cotton growing capacity, the American Southern states looked like good, safe, investments for British investors who were not concerned about the morality of slavery. However, what the foreign investors did not imagine was that the Southern states would create economic suicide and precipitate the Civil War.
The bankruptcy laws give the stockholders, the bondholders, the banks and the vendors who may be owed money—they all have legal standing and are entitled to be a part of the decision process about the bankruptcy. However, the workers do not have any such entitlement as to their wage rates, their benefits, or the very existence of their jobs.
