Some more photographs from the Findhorn Foundation Ecovillage. See here for more photographs.

Apologies for the quality of the photographs, they were taken with an iPhone.

If economics tells us that a healthy market should have more than one supplier of a product to allow for competitive prices, what happens when the competing suppliers go bust trying to weather a recession?

If consumers are not spending money, suppliers will presumably attempt to entice them to spend by lowering their prices.

Thinking about the lowering of prices as an act of determining the price the market is now willing to bear for their products, should this result in a short-term deflation of retail prices? Or does this act as a longer-term expectation from consumers considering how to spend their discretionary income?

(I’ve been sitting this post for a few of months now but I didn’t think my ideas were reasonable enough to stick. The New York Times posted this anonymous letter from a bank executive identifying that credit card debt will be the next big problem.)

Recently, I moved to a new flat in Edinburgh. I visited the Halifax Bank of Scotland to let them know my new address. After we changed my address, the cashier informed me that I was eligible for a credit card from the bank without a credit check. This was a “limited time offer” for “long-term customers” of the bank. The offer of credit without proof of my ability to repay it sounded remarkably similar to the sub-prime mortgage crisis so I decided to feign interest to learn a little more.

I was told to take a seat while and offered a cup of coffee while I waited for a Financial Advisor to discuss my application. The financial advisor asked about my occupation and salary and without any proof, proceeded to offer me a credit card with a £3,500 limit based on the system.

The next financial disaster could well be your problem because you might have accepted credit from your bank during the credit crunch. If a bank has 100,000 customers with credit-check free cards, that is an easier problem to deal with than 100,000 customers with an unsecured mortage. But the credit card debt is likely to be unsecured debt and how many banks will be able to afford to announce more write-offs due to poor decisions?