It's been a busy week what with the financial system imploding and a short term contract that I needed to turn in quickly.
The project was (indirectly) for a financial institution and I had to remind myself of the order of events in the crisis - courtesy of the BBC website. Roughly this is what has been happening:
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7 September Rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
10th Start of the Lehman Brothers crisis
13th-15th Collapse of Lehman's
16th Problems at AIG
17th Barclays acquires Lehman's assets
18th Rescue of AIG
19th Hank Paulson announces bail-out proposals
29th Congress rejects the bail-out plan
1 October Rescue of Fortis
3rd Congress accepts the bail-out plan
5th Angela Merkel appears to guarantee all
Germans'savings
7th Collapse of IceSave
8th UK bank rescue plan announced
11th IMF worldwide plan
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For a keen (but spasmodic) blogger there's been a lot to read about but one big disincentive to commenting on what's going on; the reputations of many clever, talented people are being shot to pieces because they've promised light at the end of this tunnel (far) too soon.
Actually, there's another disincentive in that, mesmerising as the financial news has been, we are getting more of it than we can digest.
My personal view is that commentators and politicians are starting to talk about blaming people too soon. That can all be thrashed out at leisure; maybe years hence. people have started to say that the US authorities made a huge mistake in allowing Lehman's to fail but, if that mistake was so calamitous, doesn't that prove what a parlous condition the financial system was in anyway.
I also think that the psychology of watching to see if rescue plans work is all wrong. The world held its breath while Hank Paulson persuaded Congress to vote the $700 billion troubled asset recovery programme and then we realise that we need not have bothered; it wasn't enough to do the trick.
Full marks to Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and everyone else for the UK rescue plan but it's not just like a tricky medical procedure where expertise counts for everything.
Pretty soon the media will move to the other extreme of suggesting we all forget about our financial problems and just watch talent shows non-stop instead.
In fact the answer is going to be somewhere in between, getting back to doing what we do well and helping others to do likewise. The World this Weekend had an interview with Joseph Stiglitz, the economist, in which he suggested that there was plenty of work to be done improving the US's infrastructure, now that house-building is in the doldrums. And presumably the same could be said for the UK, especially when it comes to power and trains.
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Some may be inclined to say that all these troubles come from worshipping mammon rather than God. However, hoping for a banking system that works doesn't seem exactly the same as worshipping mammon. That said, I can't help feeling that the last few weeks' news have kicked away a kind of trust in the way things were. On one level, I knew that money didn't reflect some form of ultimate value but this autumn has made that fact a lot clearer.
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My partner has been away on a conference so with no car I had to take a 'from the front door' walk this week. This was on Thursday and took me to the Squirrel at Hurtmore on the path by the river close by Godalming Station then back via Norney and Eashing Bridge.
There have also been trips out to see Winkworth Arboretum and Witley Common in their autumn glory this weekend with some (late) pruning in between times.
