>Contributing to financial instability, consumer debt is at its highest
>levels, with the biggest increase among the lowest 40 percent of the
>population. Criminal loan sharks have been displaced by "legitimate" loan
>outfits that charge extortionate fees to get workers to their next
>paycheck. New, tougher bankruptcy laws will provide the "vigorish" to
>force their victims to pay up.
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This kind of debt would not have been possible without the development of the credit card, simply a form of electronic money. The effects of such consumer debt--this computer powered form of installment buying--on both the upturn (most consumption driven ever, according to Doug) and eventual downturn of the US economy will demonstrate I believe that electronic money has had as radical transformative effect as any of Gordon's epochal innovations. I still haven't had a chance to reread Joel Kurtzman's Death of Money: How the Electronic Economy Has Destablized the World's Markets and Created Financial Chaos or any such updated analysis, but I am not willing to give up the thesis that technology matters in terms of its transformative effects as much as ever.
>The 30 percent drop in stock prices in 1987 did not trigger a general
>cyclical decline in the economy.
If I remember, Kurtzman analyzes the role electronic transactions played in exacerbating the downturn.
yours, rnb