Global Crisis – The Poison and the Antidote
The Malaysian government accused of playing politics and like a Nero fiddling as Rome burned, instead of tackling the economic crisis, has responded with a mind-boggling RM60 million stimulus package which some critics still say "too little too late" and to criticisms of bailing out crony corporations and ignoring the plight of ordinary folks.
Greed is the poison in our global plight
"Greed may have plunged the current economy into global crisis, for which both individual and increasingly materialistic culture are to blame," states a British Columbia university report.
"America has an economic system set up to create the kind of mess we've seen recently," said social psychologist Tim Kasser, Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois and to drag the rest of the world into it being the epicentre of the global economic earthquake, I should add.
And even Malaysia's Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has blamed "unbridled greed" in a speech he gave at an Islamic business conference in Jakarta recently.
But are they all telling us what we know? Is it easier to diagnose the sickness than prescribe the remedy? Perhaps even harder to get the patient to take the bitter medicine? And governments still treat the symptoms not the sickness.
They say greed caused the sub-prime mortgage bubble burst that started it all, and few will disagree. Now governments everywhere are frantically defending against the tsunamis of recession threatening their economies with stimulus packages. But not enough to stem the slide into the economic abyss the IMF now calls the Great Recession and sidestepping the real problem they blame for our economic woes.
The Americans lead with President Obama's US$787 billion stimulus package. And the skeptics think stimulus packages won't be enough as the dole and unemployment queues get longer. Past studies have shown tax rebates and free money to spend don't always generate the desired outcome. In relation to the U.S. GDP the stimulus package is negligible.
The recent G20 meeting failed to reach a consensus with the U.S. advocating more pump priming and the Europeans wanting better regulation.
