To obtain loans sovereigns don’t need to threaten lenders with dungeons anymore. They now have the Basel Committee.

In Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens: A brief history of humankind” we read: “The king of Spain desperately needs more money to pay his army. He’s sure that your father has cash to spare. So he brings trumped-up treason charges against your brother. If he doesn’t come up with 20.000 gold coins forthwith, he’ll get cast into a dungeon and rot there until he dies”

Nowadays sovereigns are much more intelligent and much less transparent. They appoint their expert technocrats to the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision and who, for the purpose of setting the risk weighted capital requirements for banks, assign a 100 percent risk weight to the private sector and a zero percent risk weight to the sovereign.

Read more about the horrors of the Basel Accord of 1988, and which no one protested.