'Blanche DuBois economy'

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"According to the economist Andre Gunder Frank, "All Uncle Sam's debt, including private household consumer credit card, mortgage etc. debt of about $10 trillion, plus corporate and financial, with options, derivatives and the like, and state and local government debt comes to an unvisualizable, indeed unimaginable $37 trillion, which is nearly four times Uncle Sam's (gross domestic product)."

This rising level of indebtedness will become a huge deflationary weight on economic activity if debt growth should seriously slow -- which is the economic equivalent of a Catch-22.

The situation of the American economy becomes yet more precarious when you consider that the country's major creditors are foreigners.

The U.S. economy is being kept afloat by enormous levels of foreign lending, which allow American consumers to continue to buy more imports, which, in turn, increase already bloated trade deficits."
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THE U.S. ECONOMY
The other side of prosperity
Unpredictable inflation looms as spoiler for the good times
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/02/20/ING5IBCA8B1.DTL

















http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/02/20/INGG9BBCVK1.DTL

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