The Oil Drum

Expat as always your words are gold.

Yes, you are very Anti-American in your buying and living habits.

Not as Anti-American as I am though, as I have, in trying to "do the right thing" and keep my biz going, only going into greater and greater debt, flamed out. I am buying very little these days, and living very simply. My bankruptcy, which will be done soon, will "destroy" about $100k dollars, which I'm sure have been sliced, diced, renamed, relabeled, and are parts of peoples' stocks and bonds and funds and so on. I feel really bad about this huge amount of money which will disappear, since if I could have only gone on longer, I'm sure I could finally flame out a few years from now and destroy 2X-3X as much! Oh well, nothing in America is worth doing so much as overdoing, and I've overdone all I could.

Yes we are just beginning to see the mass bankruptcies, not only of homedebtors but of small biz's and of students, who are ending up in as much debt as the average mortgage holder. The homedebtors run out of "greater fools", the small biz people find out the suddenly pinched or destitute make poor customers, and the students, worse of all (because their debt is nondischarable) find there are no jobs.

This will be the real surprise to the powers that be, that there's so much STUFF in America's storage units and mcmansions and garages and thrift stores, that the American public can simply not buy anything beyond bare essential foodstuffs etc for a period of years, if their worldview will only change. And change it will.