The Oil Drum | Racking up the credit card debt

29 comments on Racking up the credit card debt

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louGrinzo on August 25, 2005 - 7:20am

Yes, we "economists" do think that if you reduce demand (and beyond the extremely short-term blip that we were talking about re: not topping off gas tanks), then price will decline. Economics, backed by empirical data in the form of a few bazillion data points, doesn't get much more basic than that.

Sorry if I'm being dense, but what's your point? Why refer to reducing demand as "punish[ing] the market"? That's an expression I've never heard before.

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step back on August 25, 2005 - 1:37pm

The "wisdom of the markets" says we humans should invest more and more of our finite resources into developing an "unsustainable economy". If I own a large oil field or two mega ones just for sake of argument, then it is in my Smithian short-term, self-interest (say I'm an 80 year old potentate) to use advertising of the mass deception kind in order to persuade others to buy SUV's and burn baby, burn that gasoline. Such activity increase the "Wealth of [my] Nation" and if Global Warming comes in a few years, who cares? I will have vanished before The Bottom hits. The markets always provide (... a final solution), ... err I mean Joy to the World, Joy to the Fishies in the Deep Blue sea, joy to you and me.

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29 comments on Racking up the credit card debt

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“This order [i.e. capitalism] is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with the economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”

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