Star crossed credit

Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love is a love story within a play within a film about putting on a play – but the humour of its complex and twisting plot wouldn’t function without debt and credit. The opening scene finds the theatre producer with his feet dangling over the coals as his main creditor demands payment of a loan. Most of the actors are creditors of one form another – from a stammering tailor to the debt collector himself – ‘I’m the money’ he says when challenged about his presence on the stage by the returning lead actor Ben Affleck/Mercutio.

Throughout the producer is always on the edge of bankruptcy (not least because Will Shakespeare has writers block) but is driven by a firm belief that it will turn out ok in the end – "it’s a mystery, he says repeatedly, "but it always does".

Personally, I have always found the story to be the closest I can describe the feeling of being an entrepreneur. If your feet aren’t hovering over the coals, then you aren’t trying. But I think it has a wider meaning for our current attitudes to credit and debt.

It is the informal debts and obligations of everyday life that allow the play to be created, performed and something of value created. Money and credit are more than a means to an end, they are part of the story. In many ways, our system of credit relations has become disconnected from our social networks (traditional or emerging). In part this was because credit was freely available to all – it no longer represented an obligation as such, only an opportunity. But it is also a function of a gradual ‘formalisation’ of the credit process driven by the good intentions of the regulator to make credit safe for customers. In doing so, many of the human criteria for lending (and method of repayment) became a function of good bureaucracy rather than good banking.

Banks are facilitators (not the only ones but very big ones) in the creation of wealth – as such they are part of the story. But as English cricket have found to their cost, if you are only in it for the money then the value of the whole enterprise is only measured by such criteria. What is needed are new ways of facilitating the creation of wealth through a system of credit that isn’t reduced purely to a question of money.