Britain redeemed the last of the consols in 2015. But maybe what looked like the symbolic end of perpetual finance was really the beginning of a new era of never-ending debt payments.
Indeed, with a growing number of public and private debtors issuing debt of ever-lengthening maturity, why not go all the way, and stretch the yield curve to asymptotic infinity?
That’s how debt markets began many centuries ago. They may end up there again.
Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia, is a contributor to Bloomberg Opinion.