Friedman article
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/opinion/16friedman.html?emc=eta1
I like reading Thomas Friedman mostly because he's very forward looking. This is something I've been very concerned about lately, the stagnation of America. Sure we have Facebook, Twitter, the IPhone, and Google but they're distractions, they don't really address what's needed to keep America on the cutting edge.
The issue is the insistance on the preservation of existing models rather than to try to innovate new means of wealth generation. By wealth generation, I mean provide good and services that people will pay for, rather than the elaborate shell game that is Wall Street right now. So long as the people who have money are still somehow making money, there's no real incentive to change behavior. That's mainly why health insurance reform is becoming stalled, where any real positive reform is rapidly dwindling to the point to making the system worse than we started. You can see it in other industries also, the Entertainment industry and the Automotive Industry have similar problems, where 20-plus year old business models aren't applicable anymore. Yet they retain enough influence to maintain the status quo until the whole damn system breaks.
Worst-cast scenario, the system collapses in such a way that all debts default, where the companies that issue debt repossessed assests however at the same time there isn't enough demand to make re-selling the asset profitible since there's no demand. So you end up with a small group of people owning everything which they can't sell, and a large group of people that have nothing because they are unable to buy. It probably won't come to that, but there's a chance it could.
I like reading Thomas Friedman mostly because he's very forward looking. This is something I've been very concerned about lately, the stagnation of America. Sure we have Facebook, Twitter, the IPhone, and Google but they're distractions, they don't really address what's needed to keep America on the cutting edge.
The issue is the insistance on the preservation of existing models rather than to try to innovate new means of wealth generation. By wealth generation, I mean provide good and services that people will pay for, rather than the elaborate shell game that is Wall Street right now. So long as the people who have money are still somehow making money, there's no real incentive to change behavior. That's mainly why health insurance reform is becoming stalled, where any real positive reform is rapidly dwindling to the point to making the system worse than we started. You can see it in other industries also, the Entertainment industry and the Automotive Industry have similar problems, where 20-plus year old business models aren't applicable anymore. Yet they retain enough influence to maintain the status quo until the whole damn system breaks.
Worst-cast scenario, the system collapses in such a way that all debts default, where the companies that issue debt repossessed assests however at the same time there isn't enough demand to make re-selling the asset profitible since there's no demand. So you end up with a small group of people owning everything which they can't sell, and a large group of people that have nothing because they are unable to buy. It probably won't come to that, but there's a chance it could.