@herzmeister, @Bitinvestor, et al: my issue with Ripple isn't economic, it's societal. I don't want to take out a loan for a car and end up owing money to the people closest to me. That would poison relationships mighty quick. It's a fine idea for some circumstances, but not a universal panacea.
Let's up the ante and make it my circle of 10 closest friends who through the lure of easy money end up screwing me long term for their own short term gain.
I'll take
"They screwed me out of $10,000 so I am sad and decide to start over far away from them, in Iceland"
over
"The entire U.S. banking system screwed me out of my pension so I am sad and move far away from that terrible system, to... oops, wait..."
By dismissing Ripple, you leave your 99%-ers without any tools to define the scope of a particular set of economic problems; they are at all times diversifying their risk with every potentially disastrous or ill-considered scheme out there that happens to be using Bit/Freicoin. We (hopefully) all noticed the important downside of "universal panaceas" from the effects of the mortgage crisis.
Real diversification means the power to explicitly define the scope of the economy you want when you need to do that, and that is exactly what the extant paper demurrage currencies do (and seem to do well). But that's just one of at least two important uses I can see for Ripple-- it has nothing to do with a global village of hippies creating tenuous trust relationships (which unfortunately is what the current implementation looks like, but then what does the current implementation of Bitcoin look like to a non-ideologue...)