Earn What You Spend

There are those that argue that the growth in consumer debt - especially credit cards - is primarily due to the wealthy.  Even if that may be the case, it does not mean the wealthy have the means to pay off this debt - the fact remains that consumers are overleveraged.  I previously made the [...]

Spending only what you make shouldn’t be a foreign concept.  It’ll become a whole lot more familiar in our current economic climate.
Henry Blodget at Clusterstock explains why consumers are a critical component of this recession.  [via Feelix]
Because the US consumer is finally broke.  For thirty years, we piled on debt and then spent almost every new [...]

In the newest issue of The Atlantic, Virginia Postrel writes an interesting article, The Case For Debt. I was surprised the author could miss the sea of red flags about too much debt at the consumer, corporate, and national level.  But miss it she did, and in fact she tries her best to make the ‘case’ for [...]

The national debt clock has run out of digits.  It’s an amazing (though unsurprising) turn of events - our debt as a nation has increased so much that the clock, put in place in 1989, can’t display the enormous number.

We certainly haven’t earned what we’ve spent.

In a WSJ article from yesterday, the author explores how prices are dropping right and left, leaving our nation open to the very real possibility of deflationary forces.  What’s this mean? Things get cheaper.  But as the article confirms, “deflation can lead to a vicious spiral of business closures … and layoffs.”
But one phrase in [...]