Cartoon Pen & Watercolour Copyright 2008 Jean Burman
HAVE A LISTEN!
Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine – Simon & Garfunkel
(funny how the lyrics work as well today as they did back then – grin)
Had it not been that the Large Hadron Collider was shut down last week… (and remains out of commission still)… we might have been forgiven for thinking that scientists had this week successfully created the first ever black hole with their new fangled contraption!
A black hole so deep and so dark and so unstable that it had successfully sucked a bunch of the world’s largest banks, institutions and corporations into the empty ugly void of financial “deep space”. A black hole of such gargantuan proportions that every man woman and child on the planet will not escape the “gravity” of it.
Alas… unable to blame the Collider (because it has already broken down)… we are forced to cast around for another villain. And what we see is something way more sinister. There at the helm of the mother ship… set on a doomsday course to oblivion… sits a bunch of egocentric greedy individuals whose free-range money grabbing actions have served to rewrite the pages of history with the blood of all those who trusted them to deliver up their dream of a better situation.
Worse still they were acting with impunity.
The fact that it has all gone badly wrong… was (and I dare say, still is)… of little consequence to the perpetrators.
Self regulation? Yeah right. No regulation? Oooo yeah even better!
Well what in the heck did we expect? Every mother out there could tell you… give a kid an inch and they will take a mile. And there is no reason to expect that growing TALLER will change a thing! (grin)
Loss of confidence in financial markets will have far reaching consequences… reverberating far beyond the US domestic market. Whether we like it or not we are in the midst of a global economic crisis. Everyone everywhere will suffer in some way. The US bailout may not successfully avert the inevitable… but it might shore up confidence just long enough to stabilise the markets for a short time until something can be worked out.
However without significant regulatory change the climate of corruption will continue to exist. What happened before will happen again. The challenge now (indeed the obligation) for politicians of every stripe is to get off their political high horse… and ensure that it can’t. This is not the time for politicking and political point scoring.
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