Eighteen months earlier, in the summer of 2007, as holidaymakers lay on the beach, those who bothered to read the newspapers found a couple or so new words to add to their vocabulary. For the layman, the first: liquidities crisis, made some vague sense, the second: sub-prime, made no sense at all, at least as far as his knowledge of investment banking was concerned. Over the months that followed a crisis, aptly named ‘sub-prime’, unfolded into what was beginning to look like an interminably long drama. Those and other new words soon filled the front pages of the press whilst economists of all ilks were invited to air their opinions on news programmes and talk shows spouting a new kind of jargon that quickly became familiar to the public at large.
As 2008, truly an annus horribilis, drew to an end the tremors and aftershocks of the crisis continued to ripple across the world’s economic landscape sending bankers, investors, leaders and government ministers scurrying in their efforts to dam the impending disaster. However, hope was at hand, a saviour had appeared: Barack Obama, the President-elect of the USA, the first African-American to be elected to the most powerful office on earth. After eight years of George Bush the son, and two unfinished wars, the world was almost desperate for change.
The President-elect was in a state of elevated grace. There was a Christ-like aura about him. His stirring voice invoked memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. However, the task that lay before him was daunting and would require God-like qualities to resolve. The American economy was approaching a state of accelerated systemic collapse, banks were on the verge of collapse and the pillars of the nation’s economy, GM, Ford and Chrysler cracked under the burden of debt.
The US was in a state of urgency, on the verge of implosion, and as the world looked on helpless, waiting for leadership, that great, wounded, land slowly went through the motions of preparing the inaugural ceremony for its new president.
If Charles Mackay could have observed the situation he would have no doubt felt more than a little justification for the words he wrote in his book, ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’, published in 1841: ‘Money, again, had often been the cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. ― Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one be one.’
Perhaps the world was at an historical turning point where the decisions made could threaten the wellbeing of large swathes of humanity. In the course of the coming forty or so years the world’s population would increase by an estimated four billion. How would they be fed and clothed? Would they be content to live in the misery of the past? The peoples of China, India and Africa would look towards the consumer society with rising expectancy. But would the needs and demands of ten billion human beings outstrip resources?
When the Edward Gibbon of the twenty second century writes his ‘History of the Decline and Fall of the West’, where would Wall Street capitalism feature? His future account of the collapse of the West would certainly not be tender with the leaders of today, men incapable of guiding their nations forward in the face of massive change, men unable to shake off the past, men who found themselves helplessly swept along by the tide of change and forces beyond their comprehension, men whose interests were short term and self-centred.