Hedge Funds Return To Status Quo While Governments Double Debts

[Joanne98]

I keep seeing stories of misery in the news. But when we examine these stories closely, we see more clearly how personal greed often overwhelmed common sense. Common sense is very uncommon. People imagine they have this particular virtue but often, do not. This is due to our tendency to want to do something out of either fear or desire, things we know are wrong or stupid. But have justifications for doing it, anyway.
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Staying solvent is very difficult. Building up savings is even harder. This is a cultural/ideological issue which has to tap into various belief systems in order to be operational. The human tendency is to not save. The biological tendency is to save. These two forces are in constant internal conflict. The cultural imperative to save occurs in societies that are industrializing. The cultural impulse to go into debt is imperative to all systems that are deindustrializing.

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It was rather sobering listening to the deindustrializing states lecture the industrializing states on the subject of the ‘global savings glut’. This preceded the total collapse of the banking system of the deindustrializing nations. We are still deep in the middle of this collapse. The cure for this mess was more debt piled onto the systems of the deindustrializing states. This will cause future problems which cannot be solved by denying public healthcare for the populations of the deindustrializing states.

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Pressed to Dig Up Cash, Owners Market Their Cemetery Plots – washingtonpost.com

After Debbie Jenkins got sick, couldn’t work and lost two houses to foreclosure, after she burned through her savings, moved into an unheated garage in Crofton and still found herself six months behind on her rent, she looked around for something to sell to help pay for the bologna and 60-cent cans of vegetables from the Dollar Store that she, her daughter and three grandchildren live on… .

….Jenkins decided to list her two burial plots. “MUST SELL!!!” she wrote in her free Craigslist ad. “Be prepared! Fort Lincoln The Garden of Apostles, rare opportunity to get into this sold-out section!” She included the block site and lawn crypt number, noted that such plots are worth nearly $8,000 and offered them for less than half that. “Great buy!”….

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..She worked in real estate for 33 years, she explained. In the boom years of 2004-06, she and her daughter, Dawn, 27, worked as partners, and each year saw their earnings double. They owned a flower shop. They had hundreds of listings. In 2006, each woman made six figures. They leveraged heavy debt, buying three dream houses with subprime mortgages. Jenkins drove a Corvette. She belonged to Crofton Country Club, around the corner from the garage she now rarely leaves. .

Then, in October 2007, Jenkins contracted a staph infection that grew serious, forcing her to bed for seven months. With no money coming in, her savings were soon depleted. She sold the flower shop at a loss. No longer able to pay for health insurance, Jenkins stopped taking her blood pressure and asthma medications and promptly had three minor strokes and two heart attacks.

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So, there are gods that punish humans for hubris. This woman is one of the participants who caused our entire nation and then, the entire planet to suffer an immense financial collapse as big as the Great Depression. Far from being a victim, this woman is one of the many criminal elements that used debt to increase her personal wealth. The reckless use of debt in this fashion is at the root of the causes of the global financial collapse. As the former industrial giants like England and the US deindustrialized themselves, the populace from the very highest levels to the very lowest, all became addicted to easy credit offered by the industrializing nations.

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