[PeppyGPhiB]

Originally Posted by pbear19

Ok, if I seem to be contradicting myself, let me try it this way:

1. Culturally, Americans want lots of stuff we don’t need.

2. We want those copious amounts of unnecessary things to come cheaply, because we are bargain shoppers at heart and like to feel good about the low price we paid for the massive amounts of stuff we don’t need in the first place.

3. Our demand for vast quantities of cheap unnecessary stuff feeds into the supply of easy credit.

4. With the easy credit we proceed to buy vast quantities of cheap unnecessary stuff.

I use myself as an example of someone outside the cultural norm. I don’t want lots of stuff, and the stuff that I do want I don’t want for the absolute best bargain. You can offer me all the credit you would like and I won’t take it. I agreed with Peppy, in that if culturally we were a nation that put more value in quality, maybe we might not value quantity as much and we might not be in quite the scrape we are in now. Of course it's likely the market wouldn’t have expanded as it did, either, so we would have had neither the highs nor the lows.

My last line about demand driving supply goes exactly with my point, which is that we are demanding lots of cheap crappy stuff and demanding the credit to buy it with. There are a LOT of people out there who believe that the Wal-Marts, credit card companies and predatory lenders of the world have caused the problems and consumers are not to blame. In other words, that the availability of cheap crappy stuff and easy credit (the supply) have made us culturally want those things (the demand). I believe it is the other way around, that we are culturally inclined to bargain shop and accumulate stuff, and that our cultural inclinations drove the market to where it is today.

Yes, this is what I meant. You hit the nail on the head.