On interesting bargains................

    "When people pile up debts they will find difficult and perhaps even impossible to repay, they are saying several things at once.  They are obviously saying that they want more than they can immediately afford.  They are saying, less obviously, that their present needs are so important that, to satisfy them, it is worth some future difficulty.  But in making that bargain they are implying that when the future difficulty arrives, they'll figure it out.  They don't always do that.  But you can never rule out the possibility that they will.  As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off."
-Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World