My New York Times e-line subscription has been biting virtual dusts ever since, but over the last weeks, with the absence of cable television, reading e-NYTs have become a preoccupation. The sudden penchant for e-NYTs was bore out of my interest with the on-going melt-down of the US economy, largely because I am a fan of US (blame pop culture, not imperialism), but more importantly because I want to track down the domino effect this event will provoke on other states including my poor country.
And truth to tell, a melt-down is a melt-down. Think Kilauea lava flow, or Chernobyl disaster. The plummeting of the US economy transgresses political subdivisions. It has scraped anything its hands can handle on its way down. It has perpetuated financial trouble even to Les Ulis, typical rich suburban French village where people are relatively cut above financially than the rest of the world. Baguette, an ubiquitous bread in France have risen four times as fast as the salaries of the common folk, giving the privileged French people a run for their money. So you can only think what this has to say to less competitive, derelict Philippine villages.
The US economic crisis is a complicated process, there’s macro and micro views and a shit load of social theories to explain the whole thing. Of course, I am in no position to discuss about it. Fact is, I don’t know anything about economics other than after watching the psychotic movie A Beautiful Mind (John Nash is cool). Besides, I nauseate at the thought of Economics— real people become somebody’s statistics, somebody’s statistics turn into someone’s target market. But you slack at the thought of numbers, and still nobody absolves starving people running on dirty streets, FREE TIBET, underpaid factory line workers on grieving shifts, dying wards of AIDS because of inept health system, FREE TIBET, ignorant kids deprived of basic education, Jack and Jill fetching murky water because of lack of political responsibility to tap and provide resources to village. FREE TIBET. You get the drift.
But going back to the imperialism US Economy nose-dive, I learned from one of my bosses that the limbo was instigated by the demise of real estate industry. The US government failed to appraise the escalation of developers, consequently of real estate projects, creating a market with an excess of supply. A friend who just came back from the US confirmed this, saying that since nobody seems to be investing on real estate, in effect no one buys houses anymore, the tendency of the market is to underrate its value, pinning down costs of production more than lack of sales, thus imminently turning profit to loss. “Ghost houses” refer to unsold, thus unoccupied houses. They are plenty all over, my friend said, and they are so cheap.
The first question that came to mind was: why the hell did Americans build too many houses when nobody will buy ‘em?
Megalomania is an obsession with doing extravagant or grand things. Not so rare for Americans, eh? Which keeps me thinking: if houses are cheap, then why is nobody buying them? What happened to the consumerist Americans of the Westinghouse days?
In this scenario, the problem answers the question. A lot of factors have brought American economy to its sorry state right now. A close friend who works for an American IT company said that three months ago, 400 Americans were ditched out of their company’s payroll after the company decided to outsource IT yuppies in Asia. Four hundred white heads with monthly salary of $2,000 in exchange of one hundred Pinoys/Indians for $400 per month is not a bad trade after all. I saw in the TV that BPOs have taken its toll in the American market, leaving a lot of Americans jobless, or professionally mutilated. In times like that, one can only afford to spend so little. That explains why plausible investors scamper away from investing, especially on secondary needs, because just like Russian roulette, one can never be too sure of the next trigger. It might be your job lay-off, or oil-price hike, or food famine. So who said globalization only mars weak economies?
What affects America affects me. And no, Brooke White has nothing to do with this. I just feel that we have a very austere time at this point of our history. I always thought that as the world becomes more developed, things like these cower to the backseat. There are problems which are 21st century by nature, and I was just a little disappointed that the world is worrying on a problem that once belonged to the early stages of Industrial age. America is looking forward to another bleak time reminiscent of the Great Depression in the 1920s-1940s, and that is not so cool.
What is cool is if its Jason Castro and David Cook on the finals. FREE TIBET!
In France, when you can’t afford a baguette anymore, you know you’re in trouble
- Anne-Laure Renard said while doing her shopping in the wet market of Les Ulis, France
