Of course the consequences of a Wall Street melt-down will be stark and terrible in the short term - with many ordinary people losing their jobs and homes.
More terrible than usual, only in the fact it will all happen at once, visibly. ordinary people have been losing their houses and jobs for years as a result of having these policies in place. The fact that they have been salami-sliced away rather than being cleaved off in one stroke dosn't make the losses any less painful. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
Which is not to say that I disagree -at least to an extent. Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi
On the other hand, we have a couple of silver linings. One is that quite a lot of the non-financial economy is holding reasonably well in a lot of the world. I don't know about USA all that much (don't feel like going as long as they spread paranoia at the airport), but a lot of activity is pretty much business as usual in Europe.
The other, main one, is that there is a ready plan for the crisis, which has been discussed here repeatedly. And, unlike in the 30s, it's highly unlikely that a lot of the economy will be directed towards a global war. Now, will this plan see the day? I don't know. USA have taught me to be pessimistic. But can I just state that everyone will starve? I don't think so. A sustainable development Marshall plan would do wonders.
It's a major crisis, but I'm still more far concerned by environmental degradation, water depletion and global warming than by the financial system collapse. Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi
this guy is right on the money... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
'Bad Money' by Kevin Phillips - Los Angeles Times
Still, "Bad Money" isn't entirely lacking in those. Who knew, for example, that former KGB agent Vladimir Putin earned the Russian equivalent of a doctorate from a prestigious St. Petersburg mining institute and that the dissertation he defended there dealt with the exploitation of natural resources as an engine of national development? As Phillips glancingly but provocatively suggests, knowing that tells us something instructive about Putin's transformation of Russia into a global oil titan, as well as about his aspirations for further development of a polar oil field with resources that may exceed Saudi Arabia's. (Phillips hasn't lost his talent for phrase making, and "kommissar kapitalism" seems a particularly apt description of Putin's Russia.) Because he knows the territory in a deep and reflective way, Phillips has a keen eye for the relevant historical quotation. America's recent economic folly, for example, is neatly summarized in a remark that the British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, made in 1904 to a smug group of his country's financiers: "Granted that you are the clearinghouse of the world, [but] are you entirely beyond anxiety as to the permanence of your great position? . . . Banking is not the creator of our prosperity but is the creation of it. It is not the cause of our wealth, but it is the consequence of our wealth."
