Word: debts
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Upon his return from a brief stint as a correspondent in Iraq (recounted in his previous book, War Reporting for Cowards), British journalist Chris Ayres takes up a job as a Hollywood correspondent for the London Times. There, he witnesses a less violent, but equally disturbing, scene - the rapacious, debt-funded and seemingly insatiable spending habits of upwardly mobile West Coast Americans. Assigned to cover this world, he is compelled to emulate it, purchasing gargantuan televisions, unnecessary beauty treatments, pricey meals, and shady real estate. With dry British wit, he skewers American greed, L.A. life, and his own endless romantic...
...debt can lead you into ridiculous purchases: "My gym visits are now followed by eighty-dollar tennis lessons; my Dr. Bingblatz sessions are now followed by one-hundred dollar facial sessions, administered by a masked woman with a steam wand and a tweezer, who removes my blackheads one by one...I'm impressed that this service even exists. How do these leisure economy capitalists do it? How do they calculate the exact moment at which people are suddenly prepared to pay a hundred dollars for an hourlong blackhead-squeezing session...
...Reduce the outstanding principal on every single mortgage to, say, 70% of the original value. Yes, you read that correctly: lower every American homeowner's mortgage debt by a fixed percentage. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis...
...ease the transition, but he's worried that it could obscure the need for big changes in behavior. "If the moral of today's crisis is 'Let's stimulate this and bail out that, and as soon as things get back to normal, we can go back to a debt culture,' that's just not a sustainable idea," he says...
...state of co-dependence that makes separation virtually impossible. Because the Chinese are dependent on American consumers to buy their goods (the U.S. had a $246 billion trade deficit with China as of November 2008) and because the U.S. is dependent on China to fund its $10.7 trillion debt, economics bind us indissolubly together. But we are also connected in one other way. Both the U.S. and China are rich in coal as an energy source and collectively produce upwards of 50% of the world's annual emission of greenhouse gases. Unless the two nations can find...