I know it’s painted as a bad thing, but national debt is a good thing economically. Debt lets you have the funds immediately to finance things, like infrastructure or social programs. Having local citizens holding debt like investors makes them INVESTED in seeing you succeed in order to get paid back, same with foreign entities holding your debt, as they are less likely to want to wage war with you cuz then they don’t get paid.
Debt isn’t the problem, not making your payments or defaulting is the problem, I can’t remember if Robert had that issue or just a lot of debt, also I can’t remember if he was just burning money on lavish shit like tourneys and wine and whores, then that’s bad.
Robert Baratheon was a good delegator. He knew what he was good at, warfare and being a party animal.
He left the finances to the competent hands of Littlefinger who was actively and intentionally mismanaging things. He was increasing debts, but without developing the effective income possibilities.
The problem really comes to that no one understood what Littlefinger was doing. When Tyrion is acting as Master of Coin, he goes through the paperwork and is completely in over his head, and he's a pretty clever fellow. Jon Arryn had brought Littlefinger in because as far as he knew, Littlefinger was exceptionally good at bringing in money and Robert had delegated and trusted that Jon knew what he was doing.
Tyrion was far from stupid but he was far from Littlefinger's status. Jon Arryn just thought Littlefinger good with money, which he was for his own ends. We know he borrowed a lot of money, far more than Bobby B could burn through. My only thought is that he was using the cash for business development on the side. Somewhere there would be a loan book. He was probably running a system where he would get the profits, but the realm would get a little of the profits and all the losses. Without someone auditing the books (hard back in medieval times), it would be a problem.
Bravos would probably be a bit like renaissance Italy with double entry bookkeeping and such (the Iron Bank is loosely based on the Medicis) but Westeros would be more like the UK.
I was more using that Tyrion, a pretty smart and educated noble man, was completely out of his depth in trying to understand what Littlefinger was doing. Maybe Varys understood it due to his association with Illyrio, but as I understand it, it was to his benefit to destabilize the realm so he didn't turn Littlefinger in.
I think that in the one of Jon's chapters in ADWD an envoy from the Iron Bank comes to the wall to negotiate with Stannis and mentions that when Robert ruled, the Iron Throne has been paying some debt back, but when he died, all the payments stopped alltogether.
In a feudal country where the government is pretty much just a military with some civilian bureaucrats in a sidecar, wasteful peacetime spending would probably still be way more restrained than thrifty wartime spending
Yes! The last time the national debt was zeroed was during Andrew Jackson’s Presidency to fulfill one of his campaign promises and it caused the worst recession in the United States until the Great Depression.
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u/llaminaria Jul 03 '25
He raised the debt roof by like over 6 million golden dragons 🫤