Neither a borrower nor a lender be...

Today's news headlines show that the creeping deflation is being seen by the marginal players - the small conservative towns - first and eventually worst.  Eventually it will hit everywhere and many of the smallest towns without critical skills mass will consolidate or just dry up and blow away.  There will be no easy fix for the reversal of decades of easy credit.  Smart people will see this and will work to avoid the impacts by eschewing credit in their lives.  It used to be that your credit score was everything and in many cases it still is.  But this is changing and people are going to let go of the credit crutch going forward.  They will increasingly learn to live without credit.  In some case the credit will be offered but people like me will say "no thank you, I prefer not to voluntarily enter your bondage".  In most cases, however, people won't be able to afford the debt service or they won't be offered the smaller and smaller pot of credit that remains.

I know it sounds crazy to say, but you can see the clear signs nipping around the edges and if you monitor the marginal players you can see that credit driven things like land prices are slipping.  Soon it will be corporate shares that hit a brick wall and then home prices.  The revenge of the conservative saver is coming and his rise will be met with a fall from grace of the liberal debtor.