But how many people there lose everything they own due to illness?
Everything's a trade-off.
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10 years ago in my country you could not get a significant amount of money on a credit. Of course, there were credit cards but with very strict rules how to get them. There were loans, credits and mortages, but you had to give a fat collateral in order to get a loan from the bank to buy a car or a house. The leverage was 1:6 - Central bank required commercial banks to have 1 unit of real money in the treasury to give 6 units of loan.
Then, liquidity of the world financial markets started spilling over to my country too and there was the whole conundrum: easy money, stock market speculations, investment funds, forex scams, easy loans...
Two years ago the bubble had burst and now the situation here is pretty much the same as in the USA, with the difference that our currency has the same purchasing parity towards EUR and US$ as it had in 1993, in fact, US$ is worth twice less in the local currency compared to pre-EUR times before year 2000.
A lot of people are losing houses, appartments and cars here too... also jobs... companies are closing down... it is good that we did not have derivatives here, there was non-selective loan granting but not that much as in the USA.
So, you are not completely right because we are pretty much in the same mess - but the average gross salary here is around 1500 US$/month, net salary is 49 % of the gross salary, we have 23 % VAT tax on all goods and services and still, my Nissan 370 costs 2.7 x more than in the USA!
I bet it is hard for people from the USA even to comprehend that this situation is even possible. 10 kms from the place where I live, there is a small sea side town where 1 m2 of appartment costs around 10.000 US$. This means that 30 m2 one room appartment costs close to 300.000 US$. I wonder if you have ever seen 1st hand one room European style appartment with 30 m2 area.
I think that in the USA the dogs are kept in bigger cages.
Oh, well...
