They supply the goods and borrow us the money to pay for it. We simply keep spending too much and for the time being somebody else takes care of it. Michael Belkin puts it this way. Japan thinks it is supporting its own financial system, but all it is really doing is extending way too much credit to a nation that cannot afford to pay for what it consumes. Meanwhile, our public and private debt rises at the highest rate ever.
Monetary policy runs from loose to sloppy.
Central Banks support leveraged speculation. Markets everywhere catch fire. We're way past the point when we get stock tips from the barber and the shoe-shine boy. The barber is getting rich and the shoe-shine boy retired. I once wrote about F.W. Woolworth who claimed that years ago Dutch businessmen of straitlaced Puritan stock taught him how to flourish in business without borrowing money.