Tag Archives: consumer spending

Credit Scoooooooooore!

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Don’t worry about the bill, we’ll think of something. In the meantime, please, keep spending. Your country needs you to. (Photo by Jason Rogers/Flickr)

Don’t worry about the bill, we’ll think of something. In the meantime, please, keep spending. Your country needs you to. (Photo by Jason Rogers/Flickr)

I don’t know why we worry so much, when American ingenuity has always risen to the occasion, every single time, to snatch victory from the jaws of success. Once again, American financial engineers have analyzed the problem — the central problem of the American economy — and after having a couple of beers have come up with the solution. Brilliant. Prosperity is at hand.

These particular engineers are employed by Fair Isaac, who is not a handsome English squire, but the oddly named company that assigns the credit scores upon which 90% of all personal lending decisions — from credit cards to car loans to rental contracts — are based. Continue reading →

The Consumer Economy Becomes Consumptive

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The Randall Park Mall in Ohio was once the world’s largest, with two million square feet. It has ben rotting down since 2009. (Photo by Nicholas Eckhart/Flickr)

The Randall Park Mall in Ohio was once the world’s largest, with two million square feet. It has ben rotting down since 2009. (Photo by Nicholas Eckhart/Flickr)

The Masters of the Universe like to talk about our “consumer economy,” as if we have discovered the equivalent of the perpetual motion machine: an economy that can prosper while consuming, without having to produce anything except fast food and loan documents. Such an economy has the future of a snake that has swallowed its own tail — that full feeling is not going to last. Such an economy is not a “consumer” economy — that is almost an oxymoron — but a consumptive economy, which is to say one suffering from a wasting disease.

People trapped in a burning building don’t spend much time worrying about whether they have a wasting disease. So it’s understandable that with the American oil revolution imploding and the stock market reeling drunkenly along the edge of a cliff, not much attention is being paid to the spreading dry rot of ordinary American retail business. Still, it’s there. Continue reading →