Recovery: ‘Families Hoard Cash 5 Years After Crisis’
October 6th, 2013Voluntary simplicity, or, living well on very little money, kicks evil people in the nuts and gouges out their eyes… Doing this in the U.S. has a force multiplier effect because the U.S. is the largest source of the funds that keep the global ponzi scheme running. When people in wealthy countries opt out, the action causes major economic damage to the machine.
—Commentary on Voluntary Simplicity from 2007
This AP piece is remarkable:
Shunning debt and spending less can be good for one family’s finances. When hundreds of millions do it together, it can starve the global economy.
If families, acting in their own best interests, “Can starve the global economy,” something is very wrong with the global economy.
Via: AP:
Five years after U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering a global financial crisis and shattering confidence worldwide, families in major countries around the world are still hunkered down, too spooked and distrustful to take chances with their money.
An Associated Press analysis of households in the 10 biggest economies shows that families continue to spend cautiously and have pulled hundreds of billions of dollars out of stocks, cut borrowing for the first time in decades and poured money into savings and bonds that offer puny interest payments, often too low to keep up with inflation.
“It doesn’t take very much to destroy confidence, but it takes an awful lot to build it back,” says Ian Bright, senior economist at ING, a global bank based in Amsterdam. “The attitude toward risk is permanently reset.”
A flight to safety on such a global scale is unprecedented since the end of World War II.
The implications are huge: Shunning debt and spending less can be good for one family’s finances. When hundreds of millions do it together, it can starve the global economy.
