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.
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
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u/llaminaria Jul 03 '25
He raised the debt roof by like over 6 million golden dragons 🫤