People power................ the beauty of it !

I have been once again trying to digest the reams of information and rubbish talked about the "credit crunch" and have got to saturation point............. finally I have to ask myself what has it changed............ who is suffering and who is to blame for the pain..... or is it just one big smoke ball for politicians to show they are managing and governing. I seriously get the impression that there is total panic and political knee jerking going on and that finally all the action will in fact, if anything make things worse for the most vulnerable.
I read with interest a quarter of a million people pushing and shoving to buy 4GB flash chips over the weekend and wide screen TV sets and monitors..... this is something like 3% of the population of HK. I picked up early on that this whole mortgage crisis in the USA is because around 5% of the mortgage paying population is defaulting on their obligations. I am guessing that in the whole world slump in demand real oil consumption is down about 5 or 6% ! This is enough for the oil price to go down from 140$ to 40$ a barrel ! It is true that demand for autos big ticket items is down maybe a staggering 50% right now..... but this is possibly since it is such a big ticket item it is postponeable.... although can be that all peoples credit worthyness has declined enormously.
This whole thing seems to have been because of trying to get consumption growth from a relatively small part of the total population....the whole world is volatile on average to a very small change in total consumption. This means that the whole leverage game to inflate asset values pushed the system to be vulnerable to a relatively small downturn in actual consumption...then the thing spirals downwards. Pushed expansion of factories and companies to operate at close to break even on high volume output at low margins. So can it not be that we have all decided enough is enough to be continually pushed to consume..... and the population at large has decided to cut it off ! This is real people power and is a slap in the face of growth at any price. Seems to me we are in a survival mode and the politicians would be best to stay out of it !!
The market will tell us how to correct the aberation by simply turning back to value for money !
I feel comfortable that a surviving strategy for people , communities and enterprise will be found quickly as long as politicians stop playing politics ....................... a happy thought and nothing has changed.