Financial Nihilism And The Collapsing American Dream [Video]

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Following the conventional path is a dead-end. It isn’t easy to carve a path outside the well-worn pathways of debt servitude, but it is possible.

America has become a nation bifurcated into haves and have-nots, and this is generating large-scale, enduring economic, social and political consequences. In a nutshell, older generations who bought homes and other assets at low prices decades ago have benefited enormously as credit-asset bubbles have pushed the value of these assets to the moon. These generations are wealthy not from any boost in national productivity–they’re wealthy simply because they happened to buy assets in the early stages of a multi-generational bubble.

Younger generations are experiencing a double-whammy: they’re priced out of homes and other assets and they’re being crushed by the stagflation that comes with credit-asset bubbles:now that the deflationary impact of globalization has faded, the super-low interest rates of ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) and vast expansions of credit and currency …