I grew up without television.
In my later years, more recently – I had occasion to have exposure to television – before the last move, for some eight years, there was a television in my home.
The kids were watching robot wars, rebuilding of cars, myth busters and other amusing things – And even (or perhaps, particularly) on these what I thought of as rather off beat channels…
The ads were incessant. Never ending – consistent as sunrise:
“Call XYZ Today and Pay Off Your Credit Card Bills!” happy family in front of nice house with new truck… “We paid off all our bills, put on a new roof and bought this truck and our payments went DOWN!” (No mention of the new interest only or minimum payment mortgage tached to this glorious claim) “Our lives are better because the bank says we can leverage all our “assets” into liquid cash and still be solvent!”
And no one (oh no, I’m sure of it, absolutely no one) ever considered the effect of “free money” on a public consumer population with about as much financial education as a pet hamster. A public so innocent of the natural laws of finance or resource precisely because they operate in a system of debt rather than credit and their debt instruments are called “credit cards”.
And the bankers, bless them, had no idea that this scheme of theirs to “improve spending” and “increase buying power” would ever backfire – Well, no. They actually had no worries if it did – because; being the bankers, and not the ignorant innocents who make up their “customer base” they knew all along that they would never have to pay the bill.
We watch them – are they ever clever – as they rake in billions we listen to the people of the world lament how they should have done a better job at “managing their money”. Blaming themselves for their participation – they’ve forgotten the barrage of “commerce all”s that assaulted us all in the years before the “credit crisis” when we could do no wrong.
