Dalrymple on the credit crunch in this month’s essay for the New English Review…

“There is no doubt… that many people, in fact many millions of people, listened to the siren song of easy credit, of fritter now, pay later.

“The interesting question for me, then, is not that of the foolishness or dishonesty of the financial institutions, but that of the population. At what point did the population come to believe that it was possible (to cite the advertising slogan of a new credit card launched in Britain in the 1970s) to ‘take the waiting out of wanting’?

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