Wednesday, October 29, 2008

A Plea : Not another three years of "Global Healing"

IS IT DIFFERENT THIS TIME?

If it isn't, can we please have a different theme than "Global Healing" this time? We heard it so much last time, it's like a hit-single that has soured.

Can I suggest,

  • "Economic Aftercare"?
  • "A New Creditworthiness for Our Time"?
  • "Rightime Releveraging"?
  • "Flipping the Solvency Hourglass"

Back to the future:

The world is in the midst of what could well go down in history as the first recession of this modern era of globalization. It’s a recession whose seeds were sown in the depth of the financial crisis of [{insert date}]. Under the leadership of Treasury Secretary [{insert name}], the United States played a key role in staving off what he called the world’s worst financial crisis since the 1930s. It is an honor to share this platform with him this morning. But just as America moved aggressively to save the world nearly three years ago, it has paid a steep price for those noble efforts. That rescue mission fostered a climate that took the US economy to excess -- resulting in a destabilizing asset bubble, an overhang of excess capacity, and an extraordinary shortfall of consumer saving. It also left the United States with its largest balance-of-payments deficit in modern history. As you probe the implications of America’s unprecedented external imbalance, I urge you to do so in this broader context.

- Steve Roach, before congress, July, 2001

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