Can Credit Card Interest Rates be Capped?
April 3, 2025
The American politics is heating up in anticipation of the 2020 Presidential Election. Democrats are unveiling what appears to be a populist socialistic agenda. Amongst the Democrats, Bernie Sanders, in particular, is hell-bent on enacting policies which can be considered to be socialist. Bernie Sanders has found an ally in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as she too…
What is the American Dream and why was it so Good while it Lasted? For a long time, the United States was seen as the Land of Milk and Honey where anyone and everyone with some talent, lots of hard work, sheer grit, and dogged determination could make a career for themselves and raise a…
Agriculture is a prehistoric occupation. In fact, it is said that human beings only started building civilizations after they discovered agriculture. But agriculture has always been an inherently risky business. Thousands of years have passed between the discovery of agriculture and the modern society that we live in today. However, the modern farmers are exposed…
The previous article in the module introduced the global economic crisis with a brief overview of the causes. This article looks at the causes of the global economic crisis in depth.
For starters, the global economic crisis carries a distinct “Made in the USA” tag which means that the origins of the crisis are to found in the reckless lending and risky banking practices of Wall Street.
What exacerbated the situation was that the globalization of the world economy meant that the crisis was not restricted to the United States alone and hence the world economy took a beating as a result of the crisis.
The point here is that if one lives beyond one’s means, sooner or later the debts come due and the financial reckoning day would mean that one is either forced to pay up or go bankrupt.
When this happens at the individual level, it usually results in foreclosure of homes, being declared bankrupt and hence unable to pay the credit card bills etc.
When this happens across the economy and involves corporates, banks, governments (local, regional and national), and the net result is a credit crunch which in other words was the name given to the global economic crisis.
The point here is that we live in a world of limited resources and hence the paradigm of growing forever needs a rethink as there are limits to which we can use the resources. This is another aspect of the crisis which has been noted by some commentators.
To sum up, there was a convergence of different forces (economic, social and political) which resulted in a “perfect storm” of economic and social calamity. Hopefully, the crisis should serve as a warning to policymakers to promote sustainable business practices and for individuals and families to not live beyond their means.
The bottom line for any debt based economic system is that one can only postpone the day of reckoning but cannot go on forever in the expectation that the debts would not come due.
In conclusion, this article provided a detailed description of the factors that caused the global economic crisis and the subsequent articles would look at the various casual factors along with some recommendations on how to resolve the crisis.
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