Assembling Resources

Global insecurity is rife with incertitude, a hysteria of blame and mea culpas lacking sincerity, as governments try to cope with the misery they know will descend on their populations as the wealth that their enterprise has enabled their citizens to enjoy is crumbling. Global financial institutions and watchdogs have been too complacent, too inattentive to the observations of the parameters which mark healthy economies.

It is the result, self-acknowledged, of the international financial community placing its blind trust in the most powerful economy in the world, one whose adherence to heedless capitalism without any constraints, has led them to ruin. A temporary situation, but a painful one for millions of people the world over as they see their careful plans for a comfortable future eroding just as their laid-away funds are doing.

From homes and businesses lost to a collapsed mortgage scheme that practised a false pyramidal plan of advancing the worthless and overcapitalized paper through lack of adequate liquidity, to huge financial and insurance and banking and lending institutions finding themselves in the quandary of collapse. And with them the stability of countries' ability to sustain their obligations to those they govern.

China, that hugely emerging world economic powerhouse, so busy with encouraging cheap labour, cheap materials, cheap export and trade, amassing great amounts of liquidity, buying up U.S. debts, was yet incapable of supporting the dire needs of its far flung provinces whose millions of residents have not yet seen assistance in the wake of an earthquake that made them homeless.

It is, however, cognizant of the enforced slow-down of its economy and its ambitions placed on temporary hold, sufficiently to announce a $600-billion infrastructure fund to ensure that public works and employment can continue internally, to protect its workers and shore up its economy. In stark contrast to a similar (since vastly increased) sum agreed to by the U.S. Congress to bail out failing financial institutions.

The World Bank has advanced billions in desperation loans to countries of Europe, Africa and Asia on the brink of collapse, like Iceland, Ghana, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Hungary. And then there is Canada - whose sturdy and conservative banking system, the envy of much of the world - which now considers itself in fairly good shape to face the coming downturn.

Canada most certainly will suffer, since its closest and largest trading partner is in no position to buy its products at the rate it normally does, and prospects for trade elsewhere are not enhanced by the reality that most other countries are in like straits of loss of consumer confidence for the simple reason consumers have far less to spend.

Canada too, like China, is looking to shore up its internal resources to wait out the years-long storm of recession looming large on the horizon. Having set aside tens of billions for infrastructure spending, that will now be advanced. And the absurdity of lack of free trade and work opportunities between the provinces, each jealous of their own jurisdictional autonomy, may finally be relaxed.

In sensible administrations, the largest concern in any country now facing a strident downturn of confidence and liquidity, of manufacture and trade opportunities is to do what it can to put its population to gainful work, striving to curtail unemployment. An empowered work force renders hope for a more stable and profitable future for any country.

A demoralized and hapless population left to fend for itself while its government doles out taxpayer funding to wealthy corporations and financial institutions does not bode well for any country's future.