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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: russwinter who wrote (43167)	10/10/2005 8:30:10 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

speaking of WFMI, if you are ever in Austin the "flagship store" is a site to behold. it's like something out of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory (complete with a functioning chocolate fountain), or Disneyland for adults (the cheese section is about 2000 sf, and you can choose from about 50 different kinds of nuts to grind your own fresh nutbutter, and then cool off by stepping into the hermetically sealed refrigerated beer shop--quite an accomplishment to have a walk-in beer shop colder than your refrigerator in a town where the weather is 90-plus most of the year, a great offering to the gods of wanton energy use--obviously it is just too middlebrow for WFMI to have a refrigerator that only contains the beer, like every other store in America). i'd say it is the most overblown monument to consumerism i've seen outside of Las Vegas. also for some reason this store seems to attract a lot of Hummers.

To: russwinter who wrote (43167)	10/10/2005 8:38:59 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

kunstler.com What will happen to the economy connected with the easy motoring utopia - the building of ever more McHouses, WalMarts, office parks, and Pizza Huts? Over the past thirty days, with gasoline prices ratcheting above $3 a gallon, individuals all over America are deciding not to buy that new house in Partridge Acres, 34 miles from Dallas (or Minneapolis, or Denver, or Boston). Those individual choices will soon add up, and an economy addicted to that activity will be in trouble. The housing bubble has virtually become our economy. Subtract it from everything else and there's not much left besides haircutting, fried chicken, and open heart surgery. And, of course, as the housing bubble deflates, the magical mortgage machinery spinning off a fabulous stream of hallucinated credit, to be re-packaged as tradable debt, will also stop flowing into the finance sector. We face a series of ramifying, self-reinforcing, terrifying breaks from business-as-usual, and we are not prepared. We are not talking about it in the traditional forums - only in the wilderness of the internet. Mostly we face a crisis of clear thinking which will lead to further crises of authority and legitimacy - of who can be trusted to hold this project of civilization together. Americans were once a brave and forward-looking people, willing to face the facts, willing to work hard, to acknowledge the common good and contribute to it, willing to make difficult choices. We've become a nation of overfed clowns and crybabies, afraid of the truth, indifferent to the common good, hardly even a common culture, selfish, belligerent, narcissistic whiners seeking every means possible to live outside a reality-based community. These are the consequences of a value system that puts comfort, convenience, and leisure above all other considerations. These are not enough to hold a civilization together. We've signed off on all other values since the end of World War Two. Our great victory over manifest evil half a century ago was such a triumph that we have effectively - and incrementally - excused ourselves from all other duties, obligations and responsibilities. Which is exactly why we have come to refer to ourselves as consumers. That's what we call ourselves on TV, in the newspapers, in the legislatures. Consumers. What a degrading label for people who used to be citizens. Consumers have no duties, obligations, or responsibilities to anything besides their own desire to eat more Cheez Doodles and drink more beer. Think about yourself that way for twenty or thirty years and it will affect the collective spirit very negatively. And our behavior. The biggest losers, of course, end up being the generations of human beings who will follow us, because in the course of mutating into consumers, preoccupied with our Cheez Doodle consumption, we gave up on the common good, which means that we gave up on the future, and the people who will dwell in it.