I just finished watching the movie drama, Too Big Too Fail. It does a fair job of representing the timeline of events leading up to, and during the crash of 2008. Mistakes were made. The primary one with the bailout was the failure of Hank Paulson to put controls on the banks as a condition of receiving bailout money.
Paulson's reasoning was that they wouldn't take the bailout money if he did. There should have been limits on how that money could be spent. He was wrong. It did little to solve the problems, and created lots of new ones. The banks actually used this money to buy more banks. Thus, the government by bailing them out, actually helped them continue their gaming of the system. This is a complex problem with tons of little problems built into one colossal problem.
Fast forward to today. Another crisis looms, and it ain't pretty. It looks to me that we're back to the same scenario where the banks win and everyone else loses. IF we bail them out again. They have not changed their ways. In fact, we may be in worse shape now than in 08. We are in a deep hole that we cannot spend our way out of.
I personally doubt that we'll get any real solutions with the systems we have in place. Only a true awakening, will create solutions, and I don't see that happening. The people are very slow to wake up to these misdeeds, it is a slow process, and no one seems to see the urgency of our situation. By "our", I mean the entire global economic system. Oh, they see the problems, they just lack the insight and motivation to actually change, or they see ways to take advantage of the situation, and they do.
Just like the assumption that "real estate prices would always go up" lead to the crisis in the first place. It was a false assumption, a "flaw" as Alan Greenspan put it in his testimony before Congress...
What other assumptions (flaws) are driving us over the edge? Plenty of them. Wrong thinking is pervasive in the climate of now. Remember "Any yes/no question has a 50% chance of being 100% wrong". Unfortunately, we are slow to admit being "wrong", and choose to either cover up our bad decisions, or just flat out lie, and deny. That's where we are today.
So how do we change? As we gaze into the abyss, the black hole of uncontrolled change, we often can change, but only when the precipice we're standing upon breaks, and sends us plummeting into "bad things". We will cling to our positions, our decisions, even when dead wrong.
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