You will know that it is more than a recession when you see the death of fancy packaging.

I've never understood why so much money is spent on fancy packaging for goods.  I believe in sturdy but utilitarian packaging but you can see on Ebay, etc, that many things sold with original packaging are somehow worth 25-50% more than if the item is missing the packaging.  Everyone's attic is drowning in saved packaging.  I believe that this is an artifact of an expansionary money supply and that as the credit portion of the money supply diminishes, people will begin to demand a 5% lower price here, there and everywhere.  Fancy packaging will have to be one of the first things to go.

Only in the US do you see something like below.  Someone is actually trying to sell the box that their Apple computer display came in.  Price including shipping?  Nearly $50!!!   We Americans do not realize that millions of people in the world live on $4 per day.  And here we are in the US selling empty boxes to each other for $47.

This is shark jumping territory folks and I know it has been going on for some time but it will not go on indefinitely.  I predict that we will begin to see more and more goods shipped to us in less and less fancy packaging.  Coarse brown utilitarian cardboard will replace the expensive printed carton board shown below.  Styrofoam will be replaced by cheaper air pillow packaging.




America has been a very wasteful nation for at least 3 decades now and when we can no longer either rack up cheap debt OR print more money and have everyone act like nothing has changed then we will be down to the final two options:  Go Roman (i.e. take people's possessions by force and violence like the Romans did) or accept austerity.  I can tell you that there are plenty of US "leaders" would would sleep just fine at night with the former.  Useless bastards like warmonger John McCain, etc. pop to mind.  Mish refers to him and his kind as Citizens United for WW3 (scroll all the way to the bottom).

At some point someone will declare that it is a national security priority of the US to invade and steal.  We are already doing it under different names but at some point it will likely become obvios since war and violence is one of the few things that the US does much better than anyone else these days.