I searched the FM band but there was nothing besides other pious pleaders, and they didn't come in too well. The AM band offered about the same thing… - James Howard Kunstler

After the mid-1990s, there was hardly a technical distinction to be made anymore between high-risk borrowers and everybody else in the casino atmosphere of [North] America[n] society. No one was at risk anymore because, in the something-for-nothing economy, it was impossible to be a loser. Or so went the herd thinking. […] It is… likely that the housing bubble will have begun to come to grief.

Banking also regained respectability after the calamities of the 1930s. Federal deposit insurance, which had been instituted in the depths of the Great Depression, and only for deposits under $2,500, was raised to $10,000 in 1950, and the middle class was induced to feel confident about keeping its money in banks again. Interest rates remained modest, but so did inflation. The influx of savings made money available in capital markets to invest in new ventures. It was real money derived from work already done, pay already earned, true capital. Before the great orgy of mergers and consolidation that began in the 1970s, retail banking was… local and community-centered. Bankers made loan decisions based on firsthand knowledge of projects going on in their communities—not, as today, based on bundling and selling clumps of mortgages for generic suburban developments they have never laid eyes on.

In the Long Emergency schooling will be required for fewer years, and children may have to work part of the day or part of the year. Because everything will be local, the ability to support education will depend on local economic conditions and the level of social stability, and there will be broad variation. Some localities may become so distressed that public school will cease to exist. The more fortunate localities will be those where small-scale agriculture is possible, but more intensive local agriculture by nonindustrial methods implies a much different division of labor, and older children may have to assume more responsibility and grow up faster. The romanticization of childhood may prove to have been one of the luxuries of the cheap-oil age. Basic schooling, in the formal sense, might not go beyond the equivalent of today’s eighth grade. Sorting of children into vocational or academic tracks will probably be based on self-evident social and economic status rather than any formal administrative system. Only a tiny minority of young people will be able to enjoy a college education. Vocational training is much more likely to occur in the context of a workplace rather than the school, as in the apprentice system.