Reply #28: I'm afraid the fourth solution (the real one) only gets tried [View All]

[Warpy]

when the other three have failed. The fourth one depends on critical thinking, historical perspective, and the application of real knowledge to real world solutions. The other ones are nice, simple solutions for nice simpletons.

I've been telling people for years to get out of debt any way they can. A mortgage issued 10 years ago probably isn't going to be a big problem unless it's on a McMansion in the exurbs with a miserably long commute to work, but that credit card debt and those student loans that inflation has minimized have really got to go. Unsecured consumer debt is really going to sink a lot of good people in this one.

If you ever want to know where depressions come from, follow the debt. As soon as that debt exceeds assets to the point that people start getting scared and stop spending, the consumer market collapses and that, kiddies, is the definition of depression since a collapsed marketplace turns into a vicious cycle of reduced (or absent) demand leading to reduced (or absent) employment leading to even less demand. Even the rich get socked because there's no longer any place to throw around all the wealth they stripped from the working class.

If there's enough of a world left to apply the fourth solution in the OP, let's hope the people who do it manage to make it permanent by including a mechanism to prevent the accumulation of the type of vast wealth that has bought and corrupted any other reformed system.