For the past decade or so we’ve chosen to have an economy driven by financial alchemy and debt. Our government gave in to the wishes of the financial services industry and essentially let them write their own regulatory laws. The effects of which we are living with today. Now that we seemed to have, for now, contained the enormous damage of the financial implosion of 08, we must turn to what’s next. I’ve made no secret of my appreciation for former Fed chief, Paul Volcker. Today he wrote an excellent piece explaining, very simply, financial reform. At the cost of 5 minutes of careful reading, you will get an incredibly strong grasp of what needs to get done and why. Highly recommended. The financial crisis is far too important of an event for us to leave this to the “experts” to understand and solve. We all need to be aware and engaged.
The flip side of this is the question of what we want the next few decades of our economy to look like. It can continue to be driven, falsely, by debt, inflated statistics, and other tricks. Or we can work on producing things the world wants again. This article shows that, ominously, China looks like it’s in a really strong position in the clean energy race. Millions of jobs are at stake from the total of next-generation energy jobs. As we’ve seen from other manufacturing sectors, clusters develop and it can be winner take all. We need to invest heavily in R&D -and- manufacturing incentives to ensure that we can incubate these industries fully here and we give them a chance to compete.
Two types of economies here. We’re at at a pivotal time where we can ensure that our financial services sector does the things it’s supposed to without blowing up the real economy and also invest so we have an economy that produces real things of value for us and the world. I think our way forward is pretty clear…
Comments on this entry are closed.