Greece, Student Debt and Inequality

Some preliminary thoughts:

In his landmark work, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty talks at length about the growth of inherited wealth in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries and its claim on national income. Marx might have used slightly different terms, but noted the same trend in 19th Century Europe. In both periods, this seems to have contributed to, or perhaps caused, the growth of inequality.

How is this growth accomplished? Is it a product of the dominance of finance, at least in the current period? Do the banks and other financial institutions essentially facilitate the transfer of wealth from labor to the owners of capital, from the large majority of the population which actually produces wealth, to the owners of "dead labor", i.e., capital?

Forgetting for a moment the moral issues involved in inequality, if the build up of debt continues and inequality deepens, can the economy go on indefinitely without a crisis (or multiple crises)? Historically debt is destroyed in one of ways: inflation (as happened during the post WW II years), or bankruptcy (a form of forced debt forgiveness) which occurs on a large scale during depressions.

It is unlikely that the bankers, here or in Europe, will allow a period of inflation to lift the heavy load from countries (and cities) and young people. And the German bankers have made it clear in the case of Greece that voluntary debt forgiveness is not on the table (just as it is not on the table in the US for student debt). So, as we continue down the rabbit hole, it looks like the only solution is an economic crisis (or a series of "mini" crises). Well there is another solution, but ...