Just tap your heels together three times and think to yourself . . . charge it!
So there’s a bubble in the gas line. We’ll have more soon. And because the housing bubble burst (OK, it flat-out busted), there’s a slight problem with the banks. They don’t really know if they trust one another enough to loan money. But hey! It keeps our minds off the drought, right? Everyone is so focused on shortages of credit and fuel, we can almost forget we may run out of water.
To cap off this Mad Max scenario, my microwave, the ultimate appliance of convenience, has quit.
The sky is falling!
Scary times. To fuel ever-higher growth in business profits and tax revenues, we’ve built a culture of overconsumption so pervasive it will be very difficult to change. People borrowing for houses they can’t afford because mortgage bankers want to make a buck. Folks accustomed to living above their means through second mortgages. Financial institutions fueling profits by leveraging (that’s borrowing, too) to make money out of thin air. Read this “Bubblenomics” article about the recent bubbles in stock and housing markets >
The bailout only heightens my worst fear: that my children will live a lower standard of living because they have to work so hard to pay the debt their parents’ generation allowed to happen.
Will we learn a permanent lesson and change our behavior?
Friedman’s new book is on the way to me from Amazon. I hope it is all about living lightly on the land and creating jobs and profits by investing in technology and innovation to foster sustainability. And I hope everyone’s reading it.
When I want to run screaming into the street like Chicken Little, it’s nice to remind myself it could be worse. We could be in Nashville >
in BDay's bubble 