please, please, please don’t leave me

i rode my bike over to the bank today and was standing there being PUMMELED by all these advertisements, everywhere in the bank, prodding me to take on debt. i kid you not every single one of the banners, pamphlets, brochures, kiosks, (and they were on every visible surface) exhorted me to take out a loan. take money out of your house to travel! take money out of your house to build something else onto your house! take another loan out on your house to pay off your credit card loans! there was one poorly photocopied sheet advertising a 13 month cd interest rate.
the teller was pretty distraught when she saw that i was taking some of my hard cold cash out of there with me. she pleaded with me, could i maybe speak with one of their specialists about keeping the money in there. then she went to get the transaction approved and the manager asked me as well.
i didn’t bother spending time explaining that i was withdrawing the money to protect it from getting eaten away in an almost inevitable dollar devaluation or “credit event” precipitated by precisely the type of behavior that every ad in the place screamed for.
waking up at 5:30 this morning and watching the stock market react to katrina by going UP got me motivated to get to the bank today. there is a lot of froth or fluff or effervescence or just plain old delusion in this economy right now.
my move away from dollars is what i fear is going to happen on a far larger scale: people will begin to question how creditworthy the united states is, when it continues to borrow and borrow and borrow some more to rotate the debt. our economy right now, as paul krugman says, seems to center on buying and selling houses to each other with money loaned us by the chinese.
me take on debt? no thanks i’m just trying to keep ahead of that $145,000 that each man, woman and child in this country owes.