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Originally Posted by jammies
Very well articulated Claeren. I think much the same as you do, although you are obviously much more knowledgeable about the details than I.
To sum up my feelings: Everybody wants more of the pie, but nobody wants to make pie, so we buy cheap pie from the rest of the world and put it on credit. When the credit looks to be running out, we up our credit limit and merrily keep on ordering pie, pie, and more pie.
The day will come, however, when the last bit of credit is used up, and then there's going to be a shortage of pie like you don't want to even imagine. Then it'll be off to the kitchen with our fatbodies to make our own damn pies, and by then we'd better hope we haven't forgotten the recipe.
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That's exactly right. The 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s was a period of time in which 'keeping up with the Joneses' was funded by cheap and readily available credit as opposed to proportional increases in productivity. So to put it boldly everyone wanted to live like a millionaire, but did so while making thousands. Last 20 years: Want a dream vacation, a new home, a new TV, don't save up, work harder, or get a better job, just borrow with a new low introductory rate of XX%. Generically speaking, quite frankly if you were making payments on anything except for your mortgage and maybe a car (Even then how may people really 'need' to drive a new car to the point at which it costs you financially), you had no business posessing what you were making payments towards relative to what you make.