The financial crisis (Essay)

The financial crisis (Essay) 

The financial crisis is not a phenomenon we’re seeing for the first time. Various financial or other crises characterized mostly by their evanescence have emerged throughout the centuries, followed by the onset of uncertainty, which usually causes more problems than the crisis itself.

People, unsure of what the future will hold, cease to spend money, and where’s no demand, there’s no need for production either. This causes redundancies which render people even poorer, causing an even further deepening of the crisis. Once everyone realizes this, governments try to convince people to spend more, they support the economy by giving companies and banks financial injections so that they can employ more people and give more and more loans instead of going bankrupt – and the crisis is resolved. Or is it?

Actually, we have never fully resolved a crisis. It’s not in our nature to solve a problem – we just delay it as much as possible until it’s not relevant anymore. We let the future generations handle it – they’ll be smarter than us, right?

Wrong. There will be a moment, and there’s no indication whatsoever that this is not it, when we simply won’t be able to delay it any longer. We can already see the signs – whole countries close to going bankrupt with debts higher than their GDP, banks going bankrupt in turn because of the countries’ inability to pay their loans.

Conspiracy theories think the world’s going to end in 2012. While claims saying our planet will get hit by a meteorite are ridiculous at best, we may be coming to an end of the world as we know it. When the bubble really bursts and the whole economy falls, there’s no telling what might happen.

To answer the question, my expectations for the future have changed greatly in the last three years, but not because of some financial crisis. I’ve come to realize that the crisis is just a consequence and not the cause, which is that we are, collectively as a species, evil. It will be our greed and selfishness that will eventually lead to our undoing. Whether it really will happen, that I don’t know. However, I can assure you that if we don’t change ourselves, there will be no helping us.