Mhambi has been quiet of late, the reason. I’m stressed, busy and a little depressed.
Like the economy.
But if you dislike boring times – 2009 is going to be an interesting year to be alive. Possibly momentus. I was listening to the radio the other day. One commentator opinioned that the global financial crisis will have as a big an impact on our lives as the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communism.
Think that is a far fetched assertion? Well the BBC’s economics editor Robert Peston has claimed in a document titled the New Capitalism that crisis will at least hail the dawn of a newer, less intransigent capitalism. A capitalism in which the public purse plays a lot bigger role.
For many years to come, what’s happening will affect the relationship between business and government, between taxpayers and the private sector, between employers and employees, between investors and companies.
Peston notes the unsustainable and massive growth of the financial services sector in London, which is now imploding. And that the UK’s debts were the recycled savings of countries like China.
“To put it in crude terms, for much of the past decade, millions of Chinese slaved away on near subsistence wages and still managed to save… And to a large extent they were working to improve our living standards…”
The implications of this imbalance in the world economy, countries and ordinary people is scary.
Governments have intervened on an unprecedented scale to stop us from going into an all out economic smash.
But any measure to address the problem, even where essential – like where governments lend directly to businesses – where banks don’t – will come a cropper in the long term. That is if we do not address the lack of production in some countries and over production in others.
The world will have to adapt.
I will explore that in a next post.
Related deployments:
When will people start calling a spade a spade, and call this “recession” a depression?
At least we will have a break from the babbling of the market fundamentalists.
Michael, it’s called ‘talking up the market’ – or at least trying to do so
.
I suspect when stock brokers start jumping from windows and selling their cars in Wall Street we’ll know for sure that the Big D has arrived…
For interest sake, in my opinion Wikipedia’s article on the Great Depression is a good example of just how good its articles often are. Don’t know how to hyperlink here so here’s the full link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression