To a lot of people, it must seem like Americans have a suicidal debt wish. Travel writer James Salter remembers a conversation with a Frenchman who sat next to him on a plane: To throw him off I took the position that life in Europe, in his own country in particular, was in many ways better than life in the United States, a perhaps exuberant point of view but I was just seeing how things would go. “The bread is better,” I said. “The bread? Yes, perhaps.” “The food is better,” I continued. He shrugged and almost at the same time nodded a little. Between us there was the enthusiasm of men comparing wives. “The attention to the details of life,” I went on. “Yes, yes,” he said, “but the United States has given something more important to the world. The modern world could not exist without it.” “What’s that?” “They invented credit.”1