Few Things That Will Change The World After The Crisis

The Great Recession of 2007-2009 may end before we really had time to learn something, to isolate those responsible for taking care of the causes, to prevent a relapse? There’s around a great desire to turn the page without having settled the accounts. In the absurd hope that we can start from where we had stopped the other day, with the same values, the same rules as before.

Fortunately there are signs of another nature. One of these is called Kedamai Fisseha. U.S. citizen of Ethiopian origin, in 22 years he graduated in business studies at the prestigious Harvard University. One year before the argument had an internship on Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley. But now he has decided to enlist in the program Teach for America. And non-profit organization that recruits recent graduates to be sent to teach in schools in poorer neighborhoods and degradation of American cities. “I consider myself lucky – says Fisseha – the crisis at the end was a liberation for me.” Lawrence Katz, a professor at Harvard, counts the careers of all graduates of its superfacoltà from 1960 to today. “Until recently, the career in finance attracted the first on the list. Today it is not true that Wall Street has completely stopped play. These are the guys or at least part of them, who are changing interests and values.”

Towards these kids who are oriented to their future, and ourselves, we have a duty not to waste this crisis. And emergencyoperation-truth that lays bare the underlying causes of a disaster is not finished. Looking beyond the grave social harm, we need to dispel the fog horizon. We need to orient the maps, a guide of conduct, a manual of survival.

We need to understand how they come out, what the game rules, which new balances and balance of power: on our workplace and in the management of savings; in our choices of consumption and impact on the environment. In what world we will live, what actors, in which global balance. We want to know why the market economy will never be the same, and what looks like its next version. As tools to live with deflation, or what will come after deflation. What culture is affirmed in companies. What changes in banks and in our relationship with the credit. What shocks or controchoc can get by in energy and raw materials. What remains of the “models” upheld in previous years, from America to China. And if the Great Recession may give birth, as the Depression of the thirties, a current of lasting change in political systems, ideologies dominant in ethical values.

(…) The means deployed to avoid the worst have been colossal. Have magnitudes that exceed the imagination. By adding state aid to banks and lending by Central Banks of emergency in March of 2009 reaching a total of 5.500 billion dollars (…). Adjusted for inflation, the cost of bank bailouts is seven times the cost of war in Vietnam. 23 times the Apollo space program with which America came to the moon. 47 times the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe after the Second World War.
Stock exchange, bonds, houses, summer of 2007 onwards has been destroyed wealth amounted to 50,000 billion dollars. It almost the equivalent of a year of world GDP. Let’s try to translate these macro-phenomena in terms of family budgets, how many can stand if a full year of income goes up in smoke? Whatever the statistics tell us for each month, an event of this scale leaves lasting traces in the collective psychology. Remains a legacy of uncertainty, prudence in spending and investing. There is no public support that can maneuver quickly heal these wounds. The whole society is pervaded by mistrust.

(…) The future of the Old Continent could be here “syndrome Japanese. The exit from the crisis may take the form of a mock shooting, anemic, without growth. A bonanza in which all our problems become chronic, insoluble: the debt crisis of social security, to the precarious social tensions. The sinking of the Japanese model derives from the inability of the ruling classes in Tokyo to understand the deflation-depression of the nineties. Their slow sinkingthe scalpel inside a shattered banking system, and the timidity of the measures for the revival of domestic consumption, and the refusal of immigration as a remedy to falling birth rates. Are all symptoms present today in Europe. The prospect of a flat horizon, without development, it may please the proponents of de-growth, which sees GDP idolatry of “the root of all our problems: starting the destruction of the environment. But if you realize their desire, disappointment could be love. In the great calm where we will find the resources to invest in green technologies, to increase funding to public school, university, scientific research?

(…) If the Great Recession has had among its economic causes an increase in social inequality, to attack this problem becomes doubly priority. And the way to restoring a healthy growth, based on purchasing power more widely, rather than on the economy of debt. It is also a therapy for many social ills that afflict us.

(…) The Depression of the thirties was one of those moments in history when whole systems of values are reversed, you create a new civil ethics. Tempered by suffering, that the Americans called it “The Greatest Generation rediscovered faith in collective action, the utility of sacrifice, solidarity, the state’s duty to act for the common good. The major crises serve to call into question, dare to force you to where the thought had never ventured: On the twenty-first century that the verdict is open.