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Frugal is cool in cash-strapped US
- tokenadult 18y ago"The scale of the disaster is so large that Obama being America's first black president will almost be a historical footnote." Nope. Economic downturns will come and go. If this downturn tends back toward a bull market during Obama's term(s) in office, Obama will look like a genius. Anyway, there can only be one first black president, but there can be lots of presidents who enter office during an economic downturn. I'm not so sure that the American cultural shift is as profound as the article says, either. My family didn't buy a house (after returning to the United States from a stay in Taiwan) during the last several years precisely because we could easily see our local housing market was in a bubble. Plenty of Americans never used their houses as piggy banks or lived on credit cards, and plenty never will. There is cultural change at the margin, but there will always be debtors, always be speculators, and always be people who spend money conspicuously.