Game of Loans

By Carolyne Larrington

As Queen-Mother Cersei undertook her walk of shame through the streets of the capital at the end of the last season of “Game of Thrones”, she was surely plotting vengeance on those responsible for her humiliation. But she was probably also wondering exactly how she found herself in such an unfortunate situation. One reason unlikely to occur to the embattled queen is her financial naivety – namely, her failure to grasp the catastrophic nature of her fiscal policy for the Seven Kingdoms.

In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, George R. R. Martin, the author of “A Song of Ice and Fire” (the series on which the HBO show is based), complained that fantasy authors often fail to engage with economics. “As much as I admire Tolkien, I do quibble with him… What was Aragorn’s tax policy?” Martin – unlike Cersei – has thought deeply about the economic systems underpinning his imagined world, so it’s worth taking a closer look at how they function. For Cersei’s predicament, it turns out, largely derives from her failure to understand the nature of international credit.