Now that the Fed has introduced a temporary reduction in interest rates, and my selfish fear has subsided, I’ve become obsessed with the debt-ridden or bankrupt souls that we now know to call sub-primes, because loans they take out are risky or sub-prime. And the more I read about sub-primes, the sorrier I feel for them and the more it seems that our financial system relies on treating them like livestock – to be fattened up, encouraged to consume, then sacrificed when the time is right.
Poor sub-primes, sitting in their sub-prime trailers, watching sub-prime, prime time TV. All the Fed has to do is lower interest rates, as Alan Greenspan did in 2001, and they’re everybody’s favourite target: “Borrow, borrow” say the banks, “buy, buy” say the vendors of spin dryers and wide-screen TVs – and so, brainwashed by ads, crazed with sugar, the sub-primes consume like crazy, racking up vast debts. Then the economy creaks forward, fuelled by sub-prime credit until the the Fed raises interest rates again, like trip-wire, and all the sub-primes topple over, bankrupt: The sub-prime credit crunch.
I mean, Alan Greenspan staved off a post-9/11 recession, but he and all his clever friends must have foreseen the eventual suffering of the sub-primes. Isn’t that how it works?
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