The agreement to reschedule Greek debt has been in the news recently. Frequently it is pointed out that Greek debt has not been forgiven, but “merely” rescheduled. While economists and some journalists argue that this distinction is not really important in an economic sense, I am not sure that this is widely understood. It may therefore be helpful to present a few back-of-the-envelope calculations that show the power of rescheduling debt servicing, which essentially means pushing payments into the future. It brings into play what can be called the “power of exponential growth”, which is like the inverse of the “power of compound interest” that can make debt burdens snowball.

I am going to take two time periods, based on an assessment that the recent Greek debt deal extends “the average loan maturity to over 40 years from 32.5 years currently”.  To keep things simple we’ll use 32 and 40 years. [Read more…]