Dear Friend and Reader,
I was in my friendly local yarn store the other day fingering some skeins of yarn. I found a beautiful skein of alpaca from Peru, dyed with natural indigo to the most beautiful shade of blue. It was like a fuzzy twilight. I wanted it badly, had the perfect scarf pattern in mind for it and imagined myself happily knitting with my two cats, warm tea, Brahms and all the trappings that go with fiber work. Then I looked at the price.
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A salesman shows a 1kg gold bar in Tokyo. The future price of gold reached as high as $619.30 an ounce at New York Mercantile Exchange on April 17, closing at $618.80 and setting a new high in the past 25 years, up $18.90 than that in the previous trading day.
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Since I didn’t have the $30 for the yarn, I walked out of the store empty-handed. I was sad. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life working with crummy yarn because I can’t afford better, but the fact is, I don’t have the kind of money for luxury yarn. To me, this is the way to handle that great power we call wealth in our society: if you don’t have the money, you don’t get the product. To many, that is outdated economics.
Another person would have used a credit card to pay for the yarn, with the promise to pay back the credit card company later. You can pay off your mortgage with a credit card, buy a car with it, pay off hospital bills. With a credit card, you spend the money before you make it.
Money itself has gone from a symbol of property you actually own, to a symbol of a symbol. It has gotten more abstract. You can, essentially, buy whatever you want right now and pay for it later. With a system like that, the here and now of not having the resources to get what you think you want does not exist. There’s a certain timelessness involved with the current system. Buy now and pay later has become another term for: fulfill your desires, no matter the cost.
According to one source, the real reason this crisis has come about is greed. Too many at the top set out to make as much money as possible for themselves at the cost of all the smaller investors. Too many people wanted all the goods, and better than that, with none of the downside. On top of that, the smaller investors, with big dreams of wealth, began pouring their resources into things like loans for houses, selling debt, selling shares before they had bought them, selling mortgage insurance and all manner of things that make absolutely no sense to me.
I ask again, is the economic collapse that we’re facing right now due to greed? And do we all have to take a little bit of responsibility for that? Well, according to the U.S. government, who took it upon itself to buy AIG, we, the People, now own about 80% of that company, which means that for now and far into the future we have to pay for it.