At worst, they could pile up Mr Mbeki's political debts for the future.
Each switch of mayor has meant top-to-bottom changes among city officials, as political debts have been repaid with government jobs.
Like Mr Giuliani eight years ago, he is a Republican, with few political debts to the Democrat apparatchiks in City Hall.
That is close to the 7% level that Italy reached last month, triggering anxiety among Europe's political leaders that Rome's debts were becoming unsustainable.
Prospective candidates rack up big debts to bribe voters and political parties.
Additionally, the ECB statutes explicitly forbid it from creating money to finance public debts directly, it was created to maintain political independence.
That might rescue them from political meddling and raise cash to repay some of Brazil's huge debts.
But if France now believes the answer to the current crisis is a monetary union where responsibility for debts are shared then it follows that a new set of political arrangements are required in which responsibility for economic decision-making is also shared.
The LDP has survived as Japan's governing party thanks mainly to the financial and political support it enjoys from many of the private-sector companies whose bad debts now plague the banking sector.
Which actually works both ways: the political classes here in Europe seem to think that if a country defaults on its debts then it has, de facto, broken the euro.
Against this dysfunctional political backdrop, it makes no sense for Germany or the ECB to agree to pool debts, even assuming the legal obstacles could be quickly overcome.
Briefly out of a political job a decade ago, he trudged around China alone trying in vain to collect unpaid debts for Western firms.
Moreover, Moscow still finds it difficult to resist the temptation to recruit Third World countries into adopting radical policies which advance the USSR's short-term political objectives -- such as endorsing Cuba's efforts to catalyze the coordinated repudiation of Latin American debts owed the international financial community.
The World Bank's representative in Zimbabwe, Rogier van den Brink, last Thursday said the country's failure to repay its debts was creating "a fragile situation which could degenerate even further, with severe economic, social and political consequences" for southern Africa.
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