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Obama and other world leaders need to think outside the box.
It goes without saying that, most if not all, of the financial advisors to President Bush and to the Federal Reserve are in effect bankers or investment advisors. Basically they are of the same mind set as those who lost our monies in the first place and drove our economies into the dust. It further goes without saying that their big solution to the problems would be throw more of our hard-earned tax dollars to the the same people who squandered it the last time.
I have a problem with this. Have the banks removed their highly paid CEO's? Has Wall Street replaced their big-shot controllers? No! Mind you in wall street they have taken this crises to rid themselves of lower paid and in most cases powerless brokers to BS us in to believing that they are doing something--and then quickly and quietly pocketing their bonuses for a job poorly done.
When the $700 billion bail-out package was announced, one US politician said that $700 billion would fix all of the infrastructure--including all Federal, State and Municipal infrastructures everywhere in the USA.
With unemployment world-wide on the rise--and house, car, large ticket items and even Christmas sales on the decline--why would factories continue to produce products which they can no longer sell? With no need to produce more products, what need will the manufacturing sector have for borrowed money and if there is no further need to borrowed money, why in the hell are we giving so much of it to Banks who no longer will have any legitimate customers?
Does a company who needed to be bailed out with tax dollars instill trust and confidence to either share holders or future investors? I think not and I have even refrained from some investments because of this. No investor can count on government to keep pumping the amounts of monies which these companies are loosing day after day, in fact it is getting to a point where the Governments won't even be able to handle the lay offs and the social needs of their own societies.
A more practical approach would be for every government to invest in the people. In the case of the US if $700 billion will fix the total US infrastructure, let it do exactly that. Hire the very people which industry has turned their backs on at good wages, bye local or US only when it's available, lower the unemployment, reduce or even stop mortgage defaults, stimulate the economy to no end and in the end fix the infrastructure of the US, creating even more jobs and prosperity.
Canada, England, the complete EU and even the Asian economies could boom with such a plan. Just think of the possibilities if world wide unemployment was a thing of the past and government could collect income taxes from everyone.
I guess this is sort of spending your way out of a recession but let's be honest here it took a war (WWII) to spend and manufacture our way out of the last one but in either case why give the money to the people who lost theirs and created this mess in the first place. Besides the trickle down economics can only work if we can stop CEO's and other so called pillars of society from pocketing most of the money before only scraps are left for the people. There is no reason why trickle up wouldn't work better.
Cpl. Kenneth H. Young CD (ret)
Nanaimo, BC Canada
