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ASEAN PROFILES ASEAN KEY DESTINATIONS ![]()
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![]() The Installment Plan:
How It Has Taken America To Where It Is Today By The Anonymous American
Gold and silver were nice. Precious metals made into coins became popular in Western Civilisation by 700 BC when the Lydians first used them for local trade. Since coins could be assigned certain and stable values, people readily accepted them. However, as populations grew, it became inconvenient to trade and to store large quantities. People wanted and needed Representative Money. This meant that what money itself was made of no longer had to be very valuable; it was backed by a government’s or bank's promise to exchange it for a certain amount of silver or gold for the denominated currency. For example, the old Pound Sterling was once guaranteed to be redeemable for a pound of sterling silver. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the majority of currencies were based on representative money through the use of the gold standard. Well, I will not dwell on what happened with the retreat from the gold standard, as much has been written and is known of the pitfalls associated with relying on relative values that vary in mysterious ways and affect trade and commerce with inflationary and deflationary variables that vex the markets and add instability akin to nitroglycerin. But this I use as an introduction to a more virulent source of misery to the consumer as Representative Money - The Credit Card - a pre-approved form of debt extension that has come to represent, not money or simple purchasing power, but enslavement - back to the good old days of indentured servitude. With the advent of the credit card in 1950, plastic money, there was no need any longer to strike a financed deal with the retailer for that item you wanted to purchase from him. Competition took on a new face, a freedom to present yourself in financial incognito, because the retailer no longer had access to your financial condition and vulnerabilities - you had your credit, and your pride, and the ability to consume anything you wanted, even yourself. Fast forward to the present time and it is not so difficult to weave this evolution of access, excess, and credit markets into the problems evident today, excesses that expanded exponentially to meet and create demand for everything, from the proverbial scoop to nuts of the past, to a $300,000 mansion that we can afford only long enough to get sick of that “swimming pool” before we have to vacate the premises for default in payments. This is at the heart of where we are today - more to buy, more of other people’s money to spend, until we are choking on scoops and nuts in forms we could not have dreamed of as part of the landscape of the American Dream. We live in a social structure where kids rival parents for advertising dollars, and quality is a victim of shrinking margins. We have Ipods and Nike shoes that all kids NEED, we have lead-laden toys, poisoned baby formula, and impotent drugs coming from our main facilitator, China. It’s all “soooo” good! It is debt, the Installment Plan, that seeming blessing of emancipation of so many decades past that has set us on a collision course with the likes of a forming iceberg large enough to sink the Titanic. But of course, we have struck it already, haven’t we? At some point, when its people and government act irresponsibly with debt, an exemplary country, the envy of the known world, can go broke, and it’s globally contagious.
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