Lying

ByHeather

What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Like most children, my parents raised me with an unending plea to always tell the truth. In my mom’s eyes, a clean conscience was to be valued above all else. “Besides,” she always said, “if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember what you said.” I have carried this commitment to truth and honesty with me, almost to a fault. It has served me well.

As I have observed the global meltdown of the financial industry I can’t help but believe that it has been forever transformed by a blatant lack of trust. When the banks stopped lending it was clear that they no longer believed one another. The Bernie Madoff case was the icing on the cake. It seems to me that it will take a long time to restore trust and confidence into the financial system. In the process, I am not sure what kind of “financial system” will actually emerge on the other side.

Similar Posts

  • What the framers meant by ‘the people’

    ByHeather

    Even though the framers were pretty bad about race, and they certainly didn’t understand sex equality, the one thing the framers got was class. They understood that the biggest risk was to create an aristocracy. And so they insisted, as Madison said, that ‘the people’ meant ‘not the rich more than the poor.’ We’ve completely betrayed that commitment.

    — Lawrence Lessig

    Watch Lessig’s entire 12-minute interview with Bill Moyerswhen Lessig was on a march to end corruption…

  • “The Market” vs “The Economy”

    ByHeather

    With all the volatility in the stock market lately it is a good time to remind ourselves that “the market” is not the same as “the economy.” The best that I can tell — at least as of the last few years — “the market” has contracted to a relatively small group of:

    • professional traders
    • automated computer programs
    • institutional investors
    • hedge fund managers

    This tight-knit circle trades amongst itself with very little relevance to what we think of as “the economy.” In contrast to this closed group, the economy is the vast sum of the creation and delivery of the goods and services we want and need.

    It seems to me that the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 bears little connection to these things these days.

    Don’t be afraid. Now is the time to be bold. If you don’t like the economy, let’s go out and make one of our own.

  • Growth

    ByHeather

    Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

    — Edward Abbey

    Perhaps it is my natural temperament to do things deliberately and with purpose (after all, it is the tortoise who wins the race). Maybe it is my persistent skepticism. Quite possibly it is an outgrowth of my intuitive personality type (INTJ). Whatever the reason, I have always been resistant to Wall Street’s incessant demand for growth from public companies.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.