I honestly can believe the whinging that’s going on at present over the credit crunch, how we are heading for a recession etc etc. In my opinion we have nobody to blame but ourselves. We in the west have caused the problem in the first place, and for to long we have lived above our means as if it was some divine right that we should be able to have whatever we wanted.
The way I see it there are 2 reasons for the current problems we have in the west. The first one is a current problem. Since the late 80’s we have got greedier than ever as a people. We have seen no problem with living outwith our means, borrowing huge amounts of money to buy houses, cars etc etc. We would borrow as much as we could, not really looking into the fact that if the economic climate changed we could have problems repaying it. All it has taken is a slight rise in Interest rates, food and oil prices and people can’t afford the repayments.
House repossessions have rocketed and it’s no wonder. Instead of doing the sensible thing when buying a house, of working out how much you wanted to repay each month, then asking how much of a mortgage that would get you, Mortgage companies were telling people they would give them huge sums, and people were taking it. It seems a case of people were willing to take what they could get, and not realising how much they would have to repay.
And the worst of it is the banks are now complaining. Surely they must have realised people wouldn’t be able to pay them back? I can’t believe the nerve of them that for years they have been making huge profits, they have a bad year or two and they go cap in hand to the govt to bail them out. How many other businesses would be able to do this? It really does sicken me the way that the economy is run now. We as tax payers are bailing out the fat cats who have made a mess of things. Yet how much do we see when they are making huge profits? If I was a shareholder of a bank I’d be asking them to repay their huge bonuses they got to help pay for the mess. That would be a good way of fixing the credit crunch.
Onto the second part of the problem. If the credit crunch wasn’t bad enough, the rising food and gas prices top it all off. Again, we in the west are the ones that have caused the problem. About 500 years ago China and India were 2 of the most powerful countries in the world. However some how we managed to turn them into backwaters as we continued our march to dominance financially. However in the last 20 years there has been a huge change and these 2 countries, with there massive populations are now starting to flex there muscles on the world stage.
As we all know there is only a finite amount of resources in the world, and for to long we have had it easy in being able to get what ever we wanted. However as there is now huge amounts of buying power in these countries, and a demand for things like grain, oil, metals etc it pushes the price up for everyone else. It’s a classic case of as demand grows, so does the price.
From my perspective it’s a case of China and India getting back to where they should be on the world stage, and we are just going to have to deal with the fact that maybe, all the things we used to take for granted, may just go back to being luxury items. For some people under 30 say, they probably want really remember what its like to have to save for things, or not get what you want, but for those older, im sure they can all remember things were very different growing up. It’s looking more and more likely that things aren’t going to get much better in the foreseeable future, if at ever at all. I can just see it being a more level playing field in the foreseeable future, but with us in the west dropping down, just as much as other countries catching up.
