> At around 7/12/05 12:32 pm, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >
> > India Accelerating | The Car Boom
> > In Today's India, Status Comes With Four Wheels
> >
> > By AMY WALDMAN
> > VISHAKHAPATNAM, India - On the dark highway, the car showroom
> glowed in
> > the night like an American drive-in. Inside, it looked more like a
> > game-show set: bright lights, white floors, huge windows, high
> ceilings
> > and ad posters of beaming consumers far paler than most Indians.
> >
>
> I noticed this strange thing too... especially in upscale shops
> posters (ads) almost always depicted white people. "Fair skin" is
> highly coveted in India, but not that but rather logistics may be
> the reason for the white people: these products are mostly Western
> and the ads were probably imported directly from Western ad material.
If I were an advertising executive trying to sell cool cars to Indians, I'd feature this man in my ads: Nirmal Pandey, <http://www.sunilcherian.com/done_that/portraits/por_nirmal.html>.
> > In a historical blink, capitalism, which postcolonial analysis once
> > labeled poverty's cause, is now seen as its solution. Debt, once
> > anathema for the middle class, is now an acceptable means to an end.
>
> This is the aspect that surprised me the most. My family in India
> used to be more financially conservative than me, reflecting the
> larger attitude of society. Today, my family and similar middle-
> class (and upper middle class) ones spend at rates that would make
> me compare unfavourably to Silar Marner. A thousand rupees was
> parted with, it seemed to me, with much greater ease than I would
> feel spending USD20 (roughly the same amount). Some of this
> attitude in the middle class is fuelled by the need to keep up with
> the high-flying IT folks, whom they studied, worked and lived with,
> but whose earnings now could be 5-10 times as much as theirs.
Martin Hart-Landsberg says that the South Korean government successfully got the populace there to get addicted to credit cards:
<blockquote>Growth was maintained despite these developments because the government boosted private consumption by aggressively promoting credit card use. It did this by, among other things, introducing tax deductions for purchases made by credit card. The result was a credit card debt explosion. The total amount of credit card spending rose from $53 billion in 1998 to $519 billion in 2002; household debt soared from 18 percent of GDP in 1999 to 62 percent in 2001. Not surprisingly, delinquency rates began rising sharply in 2002. As reported by the Korea Economic Institute, "credit card excesses . . . created spiraling social problems [including] increasing numbers of suicides, violent crime, kidnappings, and prostitution." Frightened by the possibility that personal bankruptcies could undermine the country's financial system, the government finally took steps to limit credit card use in early 2003. Its success produced a sharp contraction in private consumption, which triggered a decline in business investment, and recession.
<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/hartlandsberg150805.html></blockquote>
When India hits the end of the current boom, maybe the Indian government will try the same.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>