Financial Nihilism and the Collapsing American Dream, by Charles Hugh Smith

You don’t have to be a debt slave, but it isn’t easy. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Following the conventional path is a deadend. It isn’t easy to carve a path outside the well-worn pathways of debt servitude, but it is possible.

America has become a nation bifurcated into haves and have-nots, and this is generating large-scale, enduring economic, social and political consequences. In a nutshell, older generations who bought homes and other assets at low prices decades ago have benefited enormously as credit-asset bubbles have pushed the value of these assets to the moon. These generations are wealthy not from any boost in national productivity–they’re wealthy simply because they happened to buy assets in the early stages of a multi-generational bubble.

Younger generations are experiencing a double-whammy: they’re priced out of homes and other assets and they’re being crushed by the stagflation that comes with credit-asset bubbles: now that the deflationary impact of globalization has faded, the super-low interest rates of ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) and vast expansions of credit and currency have finally generated embedded inflation and suppressed the only real engine of stable prosperity, increasing productivity.

This generational / class divide has led to giving up on the American Dream–or the Chinese Dream: in China, Financial Nihilism is called lying flat or let it rot, expressions of individual rejection of the social pressures to overwork and sacrifice one’s life for a rat-race with rapidly diminishing returns. This is an apt description of Financial Nihilism.

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