World Financial Crisis

Here's a Key Idea for understanding the current financial crisis in the world.

Would that the big guys in power would listen to reason a bit more, figure out core truths, and implement strategies that enhance core truths.

I watch CNN daily and so keep up with the informed minds of their key reporters. Here is my take on the current situation.

THE ARGUMENT FOR THERE IS NO REAL MONEY CRISIS

• When we see the stock market go down by what for the stock market people is, are, alarming numbers like 7% in a day, was is this not a serious issue like the finance ministers and investors like to make out?

Because:

• the decline in the stock market is natural to the ebb and flow cycles of any life process
• the KEY CONCEPT really is: is the decline in stock market values less than the gains over the past five years, say?

The Big Guys with money complain about the fall in value of their stocks, including pension plan managers for workers organizations like unions. Well, in fact over a ten year period many investors have made BIG PROFITS in their stock market investments due to inflated values of stocks over real values of the companies, governments and corporations that issue those stocks.

INFLATED VALUES occur from the stock market itself.

REAL VALUES occur from the productivity in real terms of the companies who issue stocks.

Thus downward turns in the stock market represent mostly the ups and downs of of the INFLATED VALUES due to the stock market general rise.

• TODAY'S CRISIS IN THE STOCK MARKET IS DUE MOSTLY TO THE FALL IN INFLATED VALUES OF STOCKS THEMSELVES, AND NOT DUE TO REAL VALUES OF A COMPANY'S PRODUCTIVITY.

The world is not in a productivity crisis. The world is doing very well, thank you. Don't measure the world's economy based on INFLATED VALUES due to the stock market itself.

Do measure the world's economy based or REAL VALUES, called also here, PRODUCTIVITY VALUES.

Now why don't any of the Big Boys point out this fact and calm the minds of the decision makers, large and small?

• Is there a conspiracy to excite the minds of the productive nations so as to undermine their productivity and their wealth?

We don't answer that question here because we don't have facts. Why don't we have facts?

Because no one in media is making the distinction between INFLATED VALUES and REAL VALUES.

THE LITTLE GUY IN ALL THIS - WHAT CAN WE DO?

Maybe not much. Here is another world principle:

WORLD PRINCIPLE NUMBER ONE:

• Events and processes of the world happen to a far greater extent than humanity's power to control those events.

WORLD PRINCIPLE NUMBER TWO

• The only way for humanity to have a reasonably safe and productive environment is to adapt to the WORLD PROCESS happening all the time.

COMMENT

This means that rather than seeking to control the WORLD PROCESS, organizations and decision-makers for humanity should seek to continually adapt to the WORLD PROCESS as it is happening.

In the reality of direct experience there is no other way!

FOR THE REST OF US

• Work at jobs that are based on real productivity and not artificial values
• When a financial system seems to be failing it is their inflated values structure which is failing, and not necessarily their productive system that is failing
• Work a jobs of real productivity value, such as those that produce real productivity value, like food production, needed health services
• Don't work at jobs or build businesses based on the INFLATED VALUES SECTOR OF THE ECONOMY, such as travel agencies, piloting planes, selling stocks, sales of extraneous goods, making extravagant goods such as expensive clothes, cars and other stuff people don't really need in the numbers they are manufactured at
• Dress simply, even if rich like Oprah Winfrey, who makes millions and also makes herself an example of getting rich and living a rich and exploitive life style, despite her "good works."
• If rich, join humanity and live a simple lifestyle with no extravagance, putting your surplus wealth all into projects that help the advancement of humanity as a whole, because as a whole we are all equal inheritors of the earth and the earth's resources
• Don't invest in the INFLATED VALUES sector, such as the stock market. Put surplus money only into organizations and processes whose productivity is based on real value, not inflated value

This last point means invest in land, little farms of organic produce, low cost housing for ordinary income people, small businesses that give good value locally to the people, research that aids humanity.

• Invest your surplus money only to keep up with inflation rates, and not to make artificial profits. Don't support the stock market, a great deception on humanity because it takes part of the world's productivity and extra cash and converts it into a non-productive, non-real system for artificial gains in value.
• Real value gains in an economy are based or real productivity based on real work that benefits the world rather than exploits its people and resources

COMMENT

No more hundred pairs of shoes. No more than one small house. No extra cars, only one per person at the most, preferably no car transportation at all eventually. No methane producing cows who are poluting the world. No wasteful heating. No wasteful production. End all making of plastic bags used only once. No stock market. Accumulate and lend money at reasonable rates that equal inflation rises only plus a small service fee. No profit making on any medical services! Doctors and business people deserve no more money than any other worker. No individual billionaires or even millionaires above one million, if even that.

OUR RESPONSE TO WORLD CRISIS

• try to understand the news of course
• realize that news media generally present the dominant view of society, and not necessarily the truth in fact or perspective
• seek sound principles and practices to live by, like the distinction between real value work and inflated value work
• don't seek to become rich, which is almost always due to exploiting others
• as an individual and group seek to live an ethical life based on ONE-WORLD, HUMANITARIAN VALUES
• don't do power games at home or in society in which you seek power in order to dominate others with your attitudes and supposed values
• don't fight or support wars. Wars are exploitative, dominating, horribly destructive to members of humanity and their societies in lives ruined and world resources destroyed
• do support conflict resolution practiced daily in all aspects of local and international society
• don't favor yourself over other members of your group
• don't favor your group over other groups
• don't favor your society over other societies
• don't favor your country over other countries
• don't favor the exploitation of the world and its resources and peoples over the protecting and enhancing of the world and its resources and peoples

PLEASE CONSIDER THESE AND OTHER FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS AND COMMIT TO PRACTICING THEM IN YOUR OWN LIFE AND ORGANIZATIONS.

COMMITMENT TO VALUES AND PRINCIPLES AND PROCESSES THAT WORK IS A DECIDING POINT IN ONES LIFE BECAUSE IT INCREASES ONES EFFECTIVENESS AND PURPOSE IN LIFE.

As a psychologist, professor and informed person I am a firm believer in making perspectives that fit the reality of situations.

Why? Because every day of our lives we need to keep making choices to go this way or that in enhancing our lives rather than destroying them.

Accordingly I offer here my perspectives on economic matters as if you and I were sitting together in your living room or mine watching TV for the news, say on CNN, which is the international news station I stayed tuned to daily in my life.

You might well ask, as I have, what difference does it make to keep informed? I as an individual have no power in the global economy to affect things. The Big Boys with the power in government, corporations and the banks make the big decisions which impact all of us. Why should I stay informed? What good does it do for the little guys, me and you, for instance?

REASONS FOR US LITTLE GUYS TO STAY INFORMED

• each of us needs to stay informed because we make money decisions in our daily lives as to what to buy and not buy
• we each need to have a perspective, a context of insight and values, as to how we spend the money we do have
• we each need to work to earn a living in this life. Thus the jobs we choose to stay in or go for need to be as well chosen as possible
• to make specific daily life decisions it is mostly better to have also a long-term perspective and not just a short-term perspective
• at least when you develop a perspective on life's issues you feel more understanding and calm instead of blanking out because you don't know what to think, or spending money foolishly because you don't have a realistic perspective on things

CLEAR THINKING HELPS DEVELOP REALISTIC THINKING

• Clear thinking is thinking that is logical, consistent, and organized
• Clear thinking is used daily to organize our experiences into summary lessons learned directly from experience
• Clear thinking is necessary to develop insights about ones actual experiences to show us what works and does not work for us in life
• Clear thinking helps us understand cause and effect in planning the future. When we make a choice now how does that impact us next week and three years from now
• Always make choices that solve the immediate problems of the day
• Always create a three-year context within which you make your daily choices and deal with the consequences thereof

TASK TO DO RIGHT NOW

I can tell you from counseling hundreds of people in depth about their life issues that you won't "get it" regarding this information unless you slow down and apply the real knowledge here to your own life.

1. Read a sentence or two slowly enough to understand the words.
2. Re say points important to you in your own words to further your understanding.
3. When you agree, be sure you understand what you agree on.
4. When you disagree with a statement take a moment to understand why you disagree. Is it an attitude or experience of yours that contrasts with what is being said? How can you reconcile the opposing views, if you can?
5. Think of an example from daily life that illustrates the statement that appeals to you, so that this example helps you better understand what is being said.
6. Discuss important statements, you decide, with others, so that you have a "team view". Humans have always helped each other in stress situations to understand what is happening right now and what to do about it.
7. For important insights and statements formulate three choices to make now based on the insights.
8. Deal with the consequences, have a plan for this, have resources also, be ready so that when you make a choice you are reasonably able to follow through with the choice by dealing with its consequences.
9. Trust the process, trust that if you make the most realistic and purposeful choice possible in the situation that help from others and the forces at work will also happen for you.
10. Help from the Other Side is a form of synchronicity, that there is a force at work in the situation greater than any one of its players, or greater than all the players together.

As you can see from these 10 points this perspective here is no lightweight giving of opinions but a deeply built way of living life and making choices created by intelligent people for intelligent people in their living their lives.

Sorry, but this is what we do. We live to the limit the amount of intelligence and other abilities that we do have. And we help others to do so as well.

PERSPECTIVES ON EVENTS IN THE NEWS: OCTOBER, 2008

• Right now analysts on CNN, our personal news source, are explaining to the rest of us what is going on. However, are their global perspectives accurate to the reality of the crises in the global economy, and how can we, the little guys, know?
• Even the Presidential candidates don't seem to know that much about the current economic crisis or what to do about it to solve the problem.

ISSUES AT POINT

• The CNN analysts, especially Richard Quest, give this perspective. Richard says that the world credit crisis is now based on:

1. The banks not having money to lend out to consumers to buy their new houses and cars, and things like that.
2. The banks being unwilling to lend money to each other to keep money flowing, or to lend to big corporations, who then do not have the liquidity to pay their workers or buy supplies.
3. The governments coming in months too late before the present crisis to regulate the banks and handle the credit crises already happening.
4. The consumer, you and I, being unwilling now, even if the banks were willing to lend to us, to ask for loans to buy new cars, refrigerators, vacations and so on.

This is a pretty good summary of what is currently going on in the world economy. Watch as we analyze these points and bring them down to the everyday level of you and I earning and spending our money in today's global economy.

1. Basically, what do we do not to lose our shirts in all this?
2. When the banks fail how do we survive?
3. When we lose our jobs and our incomes, how do we survive?
4. When things get worse, what do we do?

Yes, we will respond to each of these issues in a realistic problem-solving way!

Point 4 from Richard Quest of CNN is again as follows:

• 4. The consumer, you and I, being unwilling now, even if the banks were willing to lend to us, to ask for loans to buy new cars, refrigerators, vacations and so on.

OUR "LITTLE GUY" PERSPECTIVE

Present world economies are based primarily on two parts:

1. Governments, businesses and consumers pay businesses to create improvements in the infrastructure. We need better phone lines that run faster for the Internet. We always need road improvements so that goods and supplies can reach local markets to be bought. We need better and better machinery to produce other better and better machinery. We need better and better education so as to develop skilled workers to solve the present problems of society.
2. Improvements in the infrastructure is the key goal for work and production in the world. This improves the quality of living for most of the peoples of the world. It is the priority focus for "world work."
3. But manufacturing to improve the infrastructures of the world does not employ enough resources so does not create enough jobs for the working people of the world, you and I. Thus another focus for work in the world is the production of consumer goods.
4. Workers work, earn their salaries, and go home and spend their wages. The manufacture of consumer goods creates jobs because these goods are sold back to the workers who make them. Thus you as a worker get to own part of the production of what you make. Make enough tosters and get back in wages part of what those toasters sell for and you can buy a car that other workers have made. They get part of what you pay for the car they made so that they can buy toasters and refrigerators and the like.
5. Consumer goods are only necessary to maintain a certain standard of living.

You buy a new car every two years? You don't need to do that because a new car will last you a good ten years before the expenses to repair the old car are greater than buying a new car.

However, marketing and advertising try and get you to buy a new car every two years. They try and get you to buy a house when living in a smaller apartment is adequate.

KEY POINTS ON A CONSUMER ECONOMY

1. From the above example we should recognize that in reality we as a worker do not need to buy a new car every two years, not every four years, not before we have ten years of use, and even then certain cars are built to last even longer without major repairs needed. My German make VW Golf is still running fine for me 15 years later.
2. As an aware worker and consumer of goods, don't buy for advertised values. Buy only for functional use. You need a car? Buy a car that is economical, safe to drive, and will last ten to fifteen years. Don't buy for looks or having the latest.
3. Imagine how this choice to keep a car as long as it is functioning well will help your budget and economy. Richard Quest's point about consumers being afraid to buy new consumer goods now like cars, vacations and refrigerators applies here.
4. The manufacturing of the world is geared in part to the production of needed improvements in infrastructure, and in part to the production of consumer goods.

TASKS TO DO

• Stop buying goods for market values such as the prestige of having a new car every two years. Stop buying new, large houses.
• The pressure of not buying extravagant consumer goods will mean that world businesses and governments will have to orient their manufacturing needs towards building better infrastructures for all the world's peoples.
• Jobs do not have to decline because consumers no longer buy extravagant consumer goods. Manufacturing can do a lot more production of infrastructure necessities.

POSITIVE INFRASTRUCTURE GOODS AND ACTIVITIES

1. improve roads and communication lines
2. improve technologies, such as computers to make them so cheap that anyone in the world can have one and work, and learn, via the internet as well
3. improve farm production all over the world
4. improve health services, including contraceptives for birth control
5. improve sports activities for everyone so as to live a more healthy life
6. end all sorts of polluting activities via building the technology to do so. Give the Russians filters for their factories, if you have to. END POLLUTION!
7. develop renewable resources and energy so that we are not wasting the world's resources

With all of the above everyone on earth can be employed in the work and receive compensation for their work, enough to live on.

CHANGES NEEDED IN THE WORLD NOW

1. End the production of consumer goods that are extravagant
2. stop expensive holidays! They waste fuel and pollute, as well as waste money that is better put into building world infrastructures
3. stop buying consumer goods and services that are not really needed to function well in life.
4. end the "extravagance principle." The world can no longer afford the rich and their wasteful spending, such as the Queen of England does with all her palaces, and a rather commonplace personality to boot!
5. No expensive, extravagant cars, big cars, super cars. This conveys the wrong message in the world that any individual has the right to make and spend lots of money.
6. End exploitation of the world's working population and the poor. The world's resources belong to everyone equally because that is simply the way it is. We are a One World People now!

THE EVERYDAY LIVING MESSAGE

The above perspectives are not socialist propaganda from the last century but realistic awareness in today's world.

You can and even must do any and maybe all of the following:

JOBS

• Train yourself to work in sectors that help humanity by building and improving its infrastructure: nursing, government administration, doctoring, road construction and improvement, farming, building, communications
• Don't work in jobs that create a consumer economy: advertising, car sales, appliance sales, Internet marketing, extravagant clothing and appliances. Why? The consumer economy is subject to ups and downs, as we see in the present crisis.

KEY POINT AGAIN

Richard Quest of CNN asked all of us viewers: Let me ask you, he said, if you could get a loan from a bank, would you buy a new car or refrigerator now?

If you have to take out a bank loan to buy something for yourself, question seriously if you really need to possess that item.

• Having a hundred pairs of shoes? What for? Having a new car every year or so? What for?

KEY POINT

• If you have to get a bank loan then you don't need that item. Loans to consumers by banks is what got the world apparently into its present mess. The banks ran out of real money because they lent money to consumers who could not afford their big, expensive houses.
• the money lent to consumers for extravagant buys then was not available to infrastructure improvement companies to improve infrastructure
• an exasperating fact is the Bush and Congress war in Iraq wasted billions of work hours, dollars and resources. Wars are never worth the price the cost. Wars are an extravagant waste in today's world. Let's not have wars anymore. The world and us cannot afford them

FOR THE CONSUMER-WORKER

• Make a strong choice then to work in infrastructure jobs because by necessity the world needs infrastructure before it needs extravagant spending on consumer goods.

Yes, spend money for consumer goods, but only on those goods and services that:

1. Maintain a healthy but not extravagant standard of living for yourself and those you love.
2. Spend extra money left over on infrastructure. Improve your home. Get good computers that better allow you to be productive. If you have one job also build another vocation for personal creativity and bringing in some money. Do services which help humanity. Spend surplus money on helping good causes you believe in, such as helping authors publish their books and get them to readers. And so on.
3. Keep spending surplus money and time from earning your daily bread on education. Let your new learning be practical, developing your skills and values in a realistic way so that you become a more effective person in life.
4. Work with others of like mind and values to build organizations and groups that are effective in promulgating their values in real time in a real world.
5. Fight corruption and greed wherever you encounter it, especially among friends and acquaintances. There simply are greedy and deceptive people by personality in this life. Deal with them. Befriend them. Challenge them. Try to limit or change their greed and insecurity issues.
6. Fight evil but give only a forth of your time and money to fighting evil. Spend three fourths of your time and money building that which is good, positive, effective and of value in this life.
7. Have a strong and realistic perspective for yourself as the context out of which you make choices regarding where and how you work in the world, and on what you spend your hard-earned money.

Good luck with it all!

Strephon Kaplan-Williams