Got Moxie!

The Global Financial Crisis is My Fault

Oh, and it’s yours too.

Guest blogger, Carolyn Ride, comes clean and reveals the real players in the economic meltdown. It’s ugly folks but the truth must out.

As the storm clouds of the global financial crisis were gathering in the US in early 2008, and we watched in alarm as the map showed said storm ready to flatten the rest of the world, the experts started looking for who to blame.

I have to say, a lot of, like, fully unfair stones were cast at those unsung heroes of the financial coalface (or, in the case of our mineral exports, the literal coalface). These bankers, non-conforming lenders, stockbrokers, retailers, wholesalers and insurers, whose only mission is to provide their customers (us) with superior, internationally competitive and best practice products were accused of heinous crimes. Over-borrowing. Over-lending. Falsifying their reports and covering up their losses. Spending more profligately and unwisely than an oil sheik at a gold bathroom fittings warehouse.

Fortunately, wiser heads eventually prevailed and now we’re hearing financial commentary that’s not afraid to take on the real architects of all this global pain. Me and you. We wanted it all. We wanted to own the giant McMansion in the burbs and the tree-change weekender powered by positive thoughts. We wanted the plasma screen TV and the Tivo and the King Island brie and the closet full of Made In China clothes (timed perfectly to fall apart in one month or when fashions changed, whichever came first). We wanted to make two grand a week digging polluting coal out of the ground and to get flown to the city for R&R by long-suffering employers. We were perverse with Thing Lust, feverish with Affluenza, and controlled only by forces even darker than our own impulses: Tween girls and toddlers drunk on pester power.

It took real courage for a brave few – economists, politicians, a couple of Wall Street Warriors – to speak out, hesitantly at first, to say that the crisis was regular people’s fault and not the experts unjustly singled out simply because it was their job to manage money, market cycles and consumer demand.

The debate had been hamstrung by muddled thinking. Should an organisation whose business is loans be forced to take the blame for encouraging the financially unstable to get into debt, then using their repayments to play (and lose in) the short-term money market? Should the government of, say, Australia, be criticised for basing all their plans for prosperity on selling raw materials instead of encouraging clean industry and knowledge economies? Should CEOs be forced to pay back their megabonuses when their companies fail, or even get prosecuted for falsifying corporate reports?

Plenty of bitter, jealous types like Ross Gittins of the Sydney Morning Herald thought so, not even caring how such sniping could damage a leader’s self-esteem. Lucky there was the example of the corporate and government response to global warming to guide the experts, or we might still be ruled by Tall Poppy Syndrome. “As a giant agribusiness corporation, we would be so hurting if you made us go green. We’d have no choice but to make the economy suffer. Anyway, it’s not our fault. It’s those yobs who drive old cars, do five loads of washing in a top-loader and leave their lights on”. Cue “10 things you can do” awareness pamphlet sponsored by agribusiness corporation and a government-sponsored “dob in a V8 driver” hotline.

Sure, as individuals we are learning to be more aware of our patterns of excess and debt. But that hardly means we have learned the real lesson, which is “It’s ALL our fault”. Our Federal Government took valuable time at the end of last year away from bailing out car manufacturers and success-phobic childcare centres to hand some of you cash money to ease the financial stress of Christmas. All they asked in return is that you do a little bit of meaningless consumption – I mean, do your bit to support the economy. Yet so many people (I’m ashamed to say, including me) didn’t do the big Christmas shop. Some even, as the financial analyst on SBS News said with disgust, put their handout into debt repayment or savings.

So I take responsibility for all the credit-fuelled consumption frenzy that led to the economy overheating and the subsequent crash. I also take responsibility for saving when I should have started spending. As should you. 

On behalf of ordinary people who should have done better, I apologise to the people who simply found themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong bag of money in their hands – ours. I’ll apologise to you in person should we ever meet at the traffic lights as I’m washing the window of your Lexus for small change.

Carolyn Ride is a writer, reviewer and editor who has generously contributed this article in the hope that I will stop nagging her about doing her own blog. I would love to provide a link to her other writing, but, she doesn’t have a website. (Or a blog!) – TW

Yeah, but I have my own team of scribes chiselling my words of wisdom as we speak. Check again in ten years – CR

 

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