Risky Business

I am perhaps one of the least qualified persons on the planet to comment on the current global financial crisis. I did eek out a BS degree in Finance 25 years ago but honestly it is like a distant memory, a cloud-filled bubble of angst and memorized mathematical formulas. To further cement my abject lack of qualifications, I have never, not once, not ever, actually sat down and balanced my checkbook. But when I heard the chancellor of the exchequer this morning claim that no one in the government saw this coming, I had to yell back at the radio. Come on! Even my own little monkey brain saw this coming.

Just one look around town, the constant building of flats - that sit empty - waiting - for who? The growing wastelands of McMansions in the US. The skyrocketing values of houses in our own neighborhoods that we wanted to believe in but still wondered how everyone could afford $1 million houses in an average middle-class neighborhood. And there was the parade of credit card invitations in the mail, desperately looking for new suckers to sign on to the American dream. The words "zero percent introductory offer, low monthly payment" forever shackling the unsuspecting, the dreamers, the naive, the needy, to the vice-grip of high interest rates, til death or the Lotto do us part.

I think the governement just wanted us to buy more stuff to distract us from the fact that this is life during wartime. No rations, just buy more shiny cars and houses. Keep the economy pumping, keep the illusion of normalcy intact.

I mean, it doesn't take an economist to see this high-stakes gambling passing for investment banking couldn't possibly result in anything good - unless you were earning the commissions. And yet, why didn't anyone do anything? Where were the rocket red flares of warning? It seems to me that there were too many profits, not prophets, and now the little guys get hit in the gut - again. I'm all for individual fiscal reponsibility but if the banks and other financial institutions can't be bothered, what signal are they sending us? It all just makes me want to live off the grid in France, growing vegetables and drinking homemade wine.