Originally Posted by Danhedonia

I use my credit card everywhere; it gives me cash back, and I pay it off daily. Sometimes several times a day, if I'm buying a lot of stuff. If someone offered you a 1% raise, would you refuse? I even use it to pay any bill that doesn't surcharge for plastic.

Koyote also pointed out the math involved in low interest rates. If your interest on a loan is lower than a conservative estimate on rate of return for an investment, than you are being foolish avoiding the loan. My father made a serious amount of money simply observing this 'napkin arbitrage.' My father is also a rocket scientist. For real.

To answer the OP's question about intrinsic value, you need to consider economies of scale. Companies that sell $3k bikes don't have the volume to where they maximize cost efficiencies. Whereas a company selling millions of $25k automobiles does. This is why chocolate at the boutique place costs $20 a pound (or more), but Whitman's samplers come cheap. Because the overhead of any company is fixed, to a degree, and the smaller the enterprise, the greater the cost of sales.