Asia generally is quite reserved with credit card use, which I find incredibly annoying.

In Taiwan, cash is strongly preferred, as the credit card has a very high transaction cost (like 3~5%) so usually the merchant will add that value to the total cost of purchase. Also, if paid in cash, they have the option of not giving a receipt, effectively hiding the transaction to be taxed.

In Singapore, credit card use is most prevalent amongst Asian countries I've been to.

China barely accepts credit cards. When it does, it only accepts their local Union Bank credit cards and not Visa or Mastercard

And in Japan, they just pay with their phone or something.

Actually in many major Asian cities, the card you use to ride the metro can be used for payments at many locations. This is especially true in Japan.

It's not supposed to be funny but I laughed

OKEEY OKEEY OKEY OKEY OKEEY

fasten ur seatbelt lol

wish we would stop governed by the markets instead of our governments

markets are basically an indicator of how good/bad a government is doing.

This coin has two faces.

If we were to borrow to ourselves at 0% we would resume spending like there is no tomorrow and go deeper in the ponzi fairy

If we borrow from markets they say "now stop it you borrowed too much" which is good because govs are way too hungry, but it worsens the problem at the same time because of the unsustainable rates

Markets are made of real people, that lend their real money, and want to be reimbursed, and banks that lend money they just printed out of thin air, and are happy to live on the interrests only pretty much. If they don't get reimbursed on principal, they have to mark it as a "loss" but the taxpayer will rescue them anyway.

No wonders there are everyday fewer real investors out there on this fake free market.

Also I believe the major issue we're facing, the very root of the problem, is not how we borrow but the size of our governments.

They have become hungry monsters that literally strangle the very life out of the economy because they are so fat they need every day more taxes to continue to exist.

On the other side we can all see how well the "privatize everything" works out in England... but I'm quite sure that the City is raping the land so maybe not a good example.

Sweden seems to have found the sweet spot between total liberalism that basically says "let the poor die he's useless anyway" and strangling (the working class pays for everybody) socialism.

It backfires here in France as a working guy that gets 1300 Euros/Month netto is getting taxed around 100 Euros per month (not including VAT etc. this is only taxes due to the town, region and state after netto income) when unemployed he'd get 900 Euros per month netto without any taxes to pay. Remove a car and fuel to get to work and it's more or less the same, so why work your ass off after all?

Same with black market rising when alcohool/fuel/cigarettes/work become so expensive, it becomes "ethic" to bypass the system or better said it becomes a necessity for the not-so-rich. The system gets then fewer money from taxes and increases them on the idiots still paying.

The governments are in a self-destruction spiral but can't/don't want to stop until it collapses.

sweden has 9 million people, norway and denmark 5 milion each

france and italy for example have 60 milion duders each and far more culturally diverse than the populations in scandinavian countries - I love the way things work in the land of snownigs but tired of hearing how we should use them as a model for bigger countries since scale *does* matter

for comparison, imagine you were in a room and you had to sort a dispute between 4 people, or 48 people - because that is the size ratio we are talking about

You have a point, and this is also why people pretending we should all pull an Iceland and send bankers to the gulag, write a new constitution and say fuck off to the IMF are being over-simplistic, failing to realize a land of 320.000 ppl is not the same as a 60 Millions one. Which is also why when a 60M land is bankrupt the whole world flickers while nobody gives a shit about Iceland.

Also I don't think Iceland is ruled by jews unlike France, so removing the powers that be (aka kleptocracy) is much easier as any critic of the powers here is heavily comdemned as anti-semitism, nationalism and whatnot.