>
>Incidentally I haven't seen it posted yet in this thread (admittedly I
>haven't read every word of every post) but the easy explanation to US
>overconsumption is debt....
>
>John Thornton
People have started viewing their houses as gigantic ATMs. Take out a home equity loan, which the banks are eager to offer you, and all of a sudden you have an extra $70k to play with. You can put on an addition, you can go through the roof, you can take several trips to Hawaii, and still have large amounts of money left over.
I shamelessly stole this line from Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer:--another man who really ought to have a weblog.
Brad DeLong 8/1/05
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/08/chris_lydons_ra.html