re: #289 GeneJockey

Here’s the irony - for as long as I’ve been alive, America’s economy did best when most Americans violated your grandmother’s rules. Indeed, we have DEPENDED on overconsumption to drive the economy. It’s what has made our rich people rich, and made everyone else more comfortable. And while it has always been true that living the way your grandmother told you was best for the individual, if everybody had, we’d all have been a lot worse off.

So, being frugal is great, if everyone else is profligate. Kinda like a farmer, who only wants a bumper crop as long as everyone else’s crop fails.

Yes, money must move. Or the whole thing falls apart.

Which is what has been happening as banks have not been lending, but holding their cash reserves hostage. They will continue to do so until Congress either caves on Dodd-Frank or the banks are forced (somehow) to give-up the fight.