A world without debt is a world whose potential energy is zero.

When the potential energy is zero, the actual energy is zero too:

“And where did the energy come from to create this matter? The answer is that it was borrowed from the gravitational energy of the universe. The universe has an enormous debt of negative gravitational energy, which exactly balances the positive energy of the matter.”
–Hawking, Stephen W. Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays. Bantam Books, 1993, p. 97

So, those who hate debt hate life itself.

The idea that all actual energy has been borrowed into existence, at the cost of incurring a debt in the form of negative potential energy, belongs not to Hawking but to Lord Kelvin:

“Thomson had adopted in 1854 the view that ‘the potential energy of gravitation may be in reality the ultimate created antecedent of all the motion, heat, and light at present in the universe’. In other words, it was ‘the original form of all the energy in the universe’.”
—Smith, Crosbie; Wise, M. Norton. Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin. CUP, 1989, p. 533

Everything is as it should be. Praise the bankers–because of them you are alive. Enjoy the inflationary free lunch known as the universe:

During inflation, while the energy of matter increases by a factor of 10⁷⁵ or more, the energy of the gravitational field becomes more and more negative to compensate. The total energy—matter plus gravitational—remains constant and very small, and could even be exactly zero. Conservation of energy places no limit on how much the Universe can inflate, as there is no limit to the amount of negative energy that can be stored in the gravitational field.
This borrowing of energy from the gravitational field gives the inflationary paradigm an entirely different perspective from the classical Big Bang theory, in which all the particles in the Universe (or at least their precursors) were assumed to be in place from the start. Inflation provides a mechanism by which the entire Universe can develop from just a few ounces of primordial matter.
Inflation is radically at odds with the old dictum of Democritus and Lucretius, “Nothing can be created from nothing.” If inflation is right, everything can be created from nothing, or at least from very little. If inflation is right, the Universe can properly be called the ultimate free lunch.
—Guth, Alan. The Inflationary Universe. Beam Line, fall 1997, p. 19

Of course there is no limit to the amount of negative energy that can be stored in the gravitational field. But there is a limit to the temperature of matter—the hotter matter becomes, the faster it radiatively “evaporates” into the ever-colder ambient space. The end of the inflationary free lunch is coming apace and hastening:

All change is relative. The universe is expanding relatively to our common material standards; our material standards are shrinking relatively to the size of the universe. The theory of the “expanding universe” might also be called the theory of the “shrinking atom”. <…>

Let us then take the whole universe as our standard of constancy, and adopt the view of a cosmic being whose body is composed of intergalactic spaces and swells as they swell. Or rather we must now say it keeps the same size, for he will not admit that it is he who has changed. Watching us for a few thousand million years, he sees us shrinking; atoms, animals, planets, even the galaxies, all shrink alike; only the intergalactic spaces remain the same. The earth spirals round the sun in an ever?decreasing orbit. It would be absurd to treat its changing revolution as a constant unit of time. The cosmic being will naturally relate his units of length and time so that the velocity of light remains constant. Our years will then decrease in geometrical progression in the cosmic scale of time. On that scale man’s life is becoming briefer; his threescore years and ten are an ever?decreasing allowance. Owing to the property of geometrical progressions an infinite number of our years will add up to a finite cosmic time; so that what we should call the end of eternity is an ordinary finite date in the cosmic calendar. But on that date the universe has expanded to infinity in our reckoning, and we have shrunk to nothing in the reckoning of the cosmic being.

We walk the stage of life, performers of a drama for the benefit of the cosmic spectator. As the scenes proceed he notices that the actors are growing smaller and the action quicker. When the last act opens the curtain rises on midget actors rushing through their parts at frantic speed. Smaller and smaller. Faster and faster. One last microscopic blurr of intense agitation. And then nothing.

—Eddington, Arthur. The Expanding Universe CUP, 1933, pp. 90–92

In 1998, Adam Riess and his team discovered that the apparent expansion of intergalactic spaces is accelerating. On 5 April 2016, Adam Riess et al. announced that the rate of the acceleration is itself increasing—over the three years since 21 March 2013, when the Planck space observatory published the local Hubble constant value, the apparent expansion of intergalactic spaces had accelerated by nine percent more than expected: Hirsch, Arthur. Our universe is expanding faster than scientists predicted, study suggests. Hub, 3 June 2016

Thus the inflationary debt pyramid known as the universe has reached its finale.

Energy is conserved, so in order to cancel the incurred negative energy (debt), you would need to spend the same amount of positive energy. But the virial theorem dictates that the amount of negative potential energy is always bigger than the amount of positive actual energy, because the system radiates away a half of the borrowed positive energy but retains the negative energy in its entirety:

After each infinitesimal step of collapse the star has to wait until it has radiated away a half of the released gravitational energy before it can continue to contract.

—Böhm-Vitense, Erika. Introduction to Stellar Astrophysics CUP, 1992, p. 29

That is why a system cannot cancel its debt. And it should not, because debt (negative potential energy) is the system’s binding energy or synergy:

In short, synergy is the consequence of the energy expended in creating order. It is locked up in the viable system created, be it an organism or a social system. It is at the level of the system. It is not discernible at the level of the system. It is not discernible at the level of the system’s components. Whenever the system is dismembered to examine its components, this binding energy dissipates. An ordered library offers systemic possibilities, such as rapid search, selection, and aggregation, that cannot be explained by looking at the books themselves. These possibilities only exist because of the investment made in defining and creating interrelations between the books, their physical arrangement and the catalogues.
—J.-C. Spender, Organizational Knowledge, Collective Practice and Penrose Rents In Michael H. Zack (ed.), Knowledge and Strategy, Routledge, 2009, p. 125

The ultimate embodiment of the universe’s debt is the wisest man.