Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.Robert Louis Stevenson

September 2008

  • The Financial Package and US

    I’ve been reading about the financial crisis and happily discovered it’s possible to understand the main outlines if one reads enough. One underlying factor hasn’t been mentioned and that is the interaction of the individual to the collective. We talk about investor relations to the market, or vice versa, but that puts it in terms of profit and loss. When you retain the same equation but re-label the participants as the individual and the collective, a picture emerges that helps us understand the need for action on the financial package. We don’t exist in a vacuum, our actions affect others, just as we are affected by the actions of many we don’t know. The point is that to preserve the individual there are times when the whole, the collective, has to come first, and that seems to be what many are having difficulty grasping. Self interest must cede to the collective good or else we all perish. Watching the U.S. House of Representatives vote on the financial package, which those who are against insist is a bailout*, I wonder if those who voted no forgot that there are times when self interest must yield to the public good. The stock market plunge right after does show how all of us bear the consequences of the decisions of a few—Not to quote Scarlet O Hara, but tomorrow is another day—assuming a few learn what they need to learn rather quickly.

    *The $700 b package is not money given outright. It is mainly to buy problematic securities and mortgages, which have a still to be determined value, which will be resold in some way, and some of which, in the arcane world of finances, can and do earn interest.

  • Some Good News

    Some news items remind us that despite our problems positive trends continue–It’s easy to look at any news site, listen to news show or read any paper and come away with the sense that the world is falling apart. An yet here and there underneath the troubles and the woes there are telling items: Polio has successfully been eradicated from Northern Afghanistan. In the Southern part polio still remains a problem, but a vaccination campaign is underway, one that includes some of the North as well in case there is contamination from its neighbor.In a globalized world where international travel is a norm, the eradication of a contagious disease in a small area is more important than it used to be. Another item with even deeper impact caught my attention. The philanthropic organizations of Bill Gates and Howard Buffett (son of Warren) gave $76 million to the U.N. World Food Programmme to buy surplus crops directly from poor farmers in Africa and Central America in order to feed people facing hunger and starvation. This is all the more noteworthy since Robert Zoellick the director of the World Bank also warned yesterday that the economic crisis of the developing world is affecting the economies of countries alrealdy suffering from high food and fuel prices. In fact if the financial crisis continues, Third World economies could really decline, for example their exports, most of which go to the West would be seriously curtailed, since the West would not be in a position to buy as much. It does make one wonder why other wealthy Americans aren’t taking Bill Gates’ example. That of course would only coumpound the good news, it would not change it. Mostly it would not change, that behind the headlines and the problems, there are trends, movements, events, acts, organizations,people, that at the very least compensate, and usually help us continue to go forward regardless of appearances.

  • P.S.

    I was wrong! And I admit it feels good. Afghanistan did stop fighting on Peace Day–at least most of the country did. And in many areas the quiet became an opportunity for polio vaccinations.
    There is hope when we least expect it!

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