Credit is the giving of buying power. This buying power is granted in exchange for a promise to pay it back, which is debt. Clearly, giving the ability to make purchases by providing credit is, in and of itself, a good thing, and not providing the power to buy and do good things can be a bad thing. For example, if there is very little credit provided for development, then there is very little development, which is a bad thing. The problem with debt arises when there is an inability to pay it back. Said differently, the question of whether rapid credit/debt growth is a good or bad thing hinges on what that credit produces and how the debt is repaid (i.e., how the debt is serviced)

Generally speaking, because credit creates both spending power and debt, whether or not more credit is desirable depends on whether the borrowed money is used productively enough to generate sufficient income to service the debt.

如何使用信贷，有没有直接或者间接的产生高于贷款利率的价值（产品或者服务）是判断一个credit/debt好坏的标准。

I strongly preferred saving to borrowing, because I felt that the upsides of debt weren’t worth its downsides, which is a perspective I presume I got from my dad. I identify with people who believe that taking on a little debt is better than taking on a lot. But over time I learned that that’s not necessarily true, especially for society as a whole (as distinct from individuals), because those who make policy for society have controls that individuals don’t. From my experiences and my research, I have learned that too little credit/debt growth can create as bad or worse economic problems as having too much, with the costs coming in the form of foregone opportunities.

Ray的态度是个人层面他更倾向于存钱以及不要借太多钱。而国家层面是不同的，因为不借钱而错过的机会成本比借太多导致问题的成本要大。

To give you an idea of what that might mean for an economy as a whole, really bad debt losses have been when roughly 40 percent of a loan’s value couldn’t be paid back. Those bad loans amount to about 20 percent of all the outstanding loans, so the losses are equal to about 8 percent of total debt. That total debt, in turn, is equal to about 200 percent of income (e.g., GDP), so the shortfall is roughly equal to 16 percent of GDP. If that cost is “socialized” (i.e., borne by the society as a whole via fiscal and/or monetary policies) and spread over 15 years, it would amount to about 1 percent per year, which is tolerable. Of course, if not spread out, the costs would be intolerable. For that reason, I am asserting that the downside risks of having a significant amount of debt depends a lot on the willingness and the ability of policy makers to spread out the losses arising from bad debts. I have seen this in all the cases I have lived through and studied. Whether policy makers can do this depends on two factors: 1) whether the debt is denominated in the currency that they control and 2) whether they have influence over how creditors and debtors behave with each other.

决策者如何处理坏债是关键。决定因素在于，这些债是本币还是外币，以及决策者对creditors和debtors的影响力。