Finance and Nuclear Winter scenarios

The New Yorker this week has a little essay about a financier, surveying the Verdun of the view from his office in Manhattan after the financial collapse. No money to borrow. And they say this interesting thing:
"Interbank lending is the photosynthesis of finance." And then they go on to say "hoarding is panic's quiet twin". And somewhere in there, the man says "nobody trusts anybody". And then, the estimation that in the past, Americans just worked harder, but there are now "not anymore hours in the day, or enough incentives, or enough to work ON."
We will all be poorer, and we will all work longer, and harder. Paying down our debts is the hardest thing we will have to do. I have been trying since my accident 4 years ago to pay down the debt we took out on an equity loan, and I have not been able to do it. Every time I get it down a by quarter, we end up re-using it for taxes or an emergency. I have been feeling this grind for a long time. I keep remembering the scene in Anna Karenina, when her brother-in-law leaves his wife and 5 children out at the ranch with Anna, and goes to St. Petersburg and eats a meal fit for an emperor, knowing he cannot afford the meal, and is essentially bankrupt. I remember he has oysters. And there are tremendous descriptions of each course they eat, and the beautiful place in which they eat it, (which I embellish with "Tavern on the Green" memories from my time in New York). He is languid with food and wine, and the scene is luscious.
And I remember and worry, and plan. I still wonder how those financiers could just overlook all the holes in the loans they made, and the unreasonable hope that it would all work out-- some kind of esoteric pyramid scheme, gone awry. The financier says that "it will take ten years for Americans to get stupid again". That sentence makes me really wonder. In the first place they say that lending is the photosynthesis of finance. But really production is the basic element. We get paid for doing work, and making things. If our salaries are insufficient to buy things, we are "poor" in relation to the luxurious way we wish to live. And still, they never speak of raising the wages. We are always compared to China, where people ARE working 16 hours a day, and not getting any time off, and living in cubicles. There is no way any of them could ever eat just one of the meals described in Anna Karenina. Floating along in life is not possible for most of us. We are working very hard to stay in the middle class, to be able to own a home, to be able to have 2 week vacations, to be able to drive our cars, which are necessary because of how our towns are built. We are scared because our health insurance has doubled in cost in the past year, and every other cost in our homes is also rising. But they still don't talk about helping increase wages. So I think the only solution is a better tax structure. Essentially, lowering taxes will increase what we get to keep. And although the government has wasted so much tax money that it is obscene, we can hope that better regulation of the corporations and the financial institutions, and appropriate taxation of those institutions will help us to live in the middle class. I think that is what Obama's reforms are about. So I really hope he wins, and that he can put these ideas into practice.