A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

The following graphic gives a very good picture of the world economic crisis:
Click to Enlarge
The above proves there is no justice. The fraud and corruption on Wall Street has triggered a worldwide crisis. But the hit on the US economy is small compared to the hit on many countries around the world. Life is not fair.

On the other hand... a lot of right wing nuts and isolationists in the US are probably dancing in the streets. Their long held dream has come true. Globalization is melting like snow on a hot summer day as trade shrinks and shrinks. If they are lucky all international trade can come to a stop and we can pull the buggies and horses out and return to the "good old days" when the only refrigerator was a box in which you put a cube of ice hacked from a frozen lake and brought to your house to sit and melt in you "icebox" to keep your perishables from rotting. Yes... the good old days.

Heck... why not go whole hog. The doom-and-gloom crowd are jumping for joy. Their dreams look as if they may come true. Why stop with the evaporation of "international" trade. Why not become "locavores" where all you can eat are the root crops and wild berries that grown near the rapidly shriking cities. Instead of the "good old days" this crowd is excited about going back to clan-on-clan warfare as it was lived on the Serengeti hundreds of thousands of years ago.

This is what greed and corruption promises to deliver. A world in which the rapacious rich can look about in horror as their pockets stuffed with funny pieces of currency can buy them nothing because their unrestrainable risk taking has delivered us a new world, a world without an economy. A world that Hobbes famously called life lived in the true state of nature: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".