Not My Financial Crisis -- I've Got Literally Nothing to Lose

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet. Posted October 13, 2008.

In a literal sense, the financial meltdown has hit me close to home. The smoking ash piles on Wall Street lay just a 10-minute walk from my front door in New York's Chinatown. But my sense of proximity to events stops there. In terms of their impact on the soundness of my sleep, at least so far, the economy in question might as well be North Korea. My feeling of remove from the crisis is a product of the fact that I don't have much to lose. Like millions of Americans, I own nothing -- not property, not stock, not a 401(k) plan, not health insurance, not a car, nothing.

Like most people I know in their 20s and 30s, it takes a stretch of the imagination to understand that I have a stake in the national economy. In terms of day-to-day life, my only ties to large financial institutions are a Bank of America checking account, a single low-limit high-fee Visa card, and a Kilimanjaro of student debt, which I have come to accept as something I will die with, not from, like a benign but grapefruit-size tumor or peaceable parasite dwelling in my large intestine. When people use scary terms like "unchartered territory" and "total meltdown," my first thought is, "Would an economic cataclysm wipe out my student debt? If so, then let's press reset and start the whole damn thing over! Burn it clean!"

I haven't heard much from or about people like me in the last month. Watching the media report on the crisis, you'd think the United States had achieved the Republican dream of becoming a full-fledged "ownership society" populated by an upwardly mobile class of home-owning day traders sitting on fat nest eggs. But it hasn't. So here's a news flash from the young-and-indebted demographic: Those of us without retirement plans or health insurance, who just barely make rent and buy food in the real economy, a lot of us aren't as scared as maybe we should be. We have our own gut take on the disappearance of $9 trillion in electronic NYSE casino chips. And that is, we could give a shit.

There is even less angst when it comes to the popped housing bubble and fractured sub-prime mortgage mess that triggered the cascade. To paraphrase Stalin: no mortgage, no problem. If you occupy your home -- in my case, a small loft that I share with seven people -- on the basis of a month-to-month lease, you're not going to mourn a steep drop in housing prices. You are going to throw a party and hang a piñata in the shape of your landlord. If my landlord faces foreclosure on his property and I am evicted, my next crisis-era apartment will be that much cheaper, assuming I can find enough work to make rent. But what else is new?

I realize at some level that it's facile to think I don't have a stake in a stable economy, or that further meltdown will affect only those with the most to lose. As the economist Max Wolff told Josh Holland in his weekend roundup of progressive expert opinion on the crisis, "The banks' pain is ours. Millions will be fired. When it rains on the top of the hill, those who live on the bottom of the hill drown." I get that. Scraping by will likely become even harder in the days ahead for people in my income bracket. But it seems to me that a decade of scraping by is good practice for whatever's coming. And it's just a fact that this particular era of capitalism hasn't been very good for those of us at the bottom of the wealth pyramid. If it takes some creative destruction to herald a new, more egalitarian, better regulated economy, then so be it. Millions of us are waiting for the reckoning with belts already tightened. They've been tightened for as long as we can remember.

Even though I don't own a home and likely never will, I sympathize with those now trapped into mortgages they can't afford. I made the exact same mistake 16 years ago, when I signed a bunch of dotted lines in order to attend a private college. I learned my lesson early and have lived within my means ever since, getting by hand to mouth on an average freelancer's salary south of $25,000. Eighteen was a good age to learn the massive-debt lesson. Unlike all those foreclosed homes, nobody can take away my fancy if useless liberal arts degree. The best side effect of the tightening credit crunch is that U.S. banks are closing down their private student loan operations, saving a new generation of high school grads from borrowing tens of thousands of dollars at high interest rates just so they can play the prestige name game with a bunch of prep-schooled future investment bankers.

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Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist.