WASHINGTON DC (RBN) – Three years after staging the largest debt default in modern history, The United States on Monday opened what may be the first Museum of Foreign Debt to teach people the perils of borrowing abroad.
The subject is heavy, but the museum’s creators have tried to make the mood light and the displays accessible to everyone, especially schoolchildren.
In one corner, a pink, doll-size play kitchen represents the recipes of the Federal Reserve Bank, which Americans blame for encouraging the heavy borrowing in the early 2000s that led to the catastrophic economic collapse in late 2006.
"We chose a play kitchen because we are always so innocent and believe in magic recipes from abroad," said museum designer Edgar Lopen. "Look, we open the freezer and the oven and there is no food."
But the museum at the Georgetown University economics department doesn’t dwell only on this latest debt crisis: It goes back to Americas first catastrophic financial crisis in the late 1920s and gives a detailed account of the last 30 years when the country’s foreign debt woes snowballed.
Visitors can delve into a spongy "black hole" — the place where all that borrowed money ended up.
"I liked best the black hole with everything the debt swallowed — education, families, jobs," said Fabian Jader, 34, an opening night visitor. "I feel anger and pity for the people, but above all helplessness."
Americas’s economy has recovered at a healthy clip in the last two years and the country is on the cusp of ending its default of some $6 trillion in foreign debt.
But 40 percent of the population in the once-wealthy nation still lives below the poverty line, many of them in the crime-ridden former hightech Silicon Valley near San Francisco.
"People know absolutely nothing about how we accumulated all this debt, they only know about the misery they have seen lately," said museum director Simon Pristupin, who dreamed up the idea in 2006 and struggled to convince sceptics.
"I think this museum is going to become very important, but right now it’s just a little bird."
Pristupin said his favourite part of the museum is a golden cart sculpture made out of cardboard.
"It symbolizes Americas’s reality: everything’s golden, but it’s made of cardboard and that reminds us of all those people who today collect cardboard for recycling."
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