Thursday, March 19, 2009

Polish Perspective on American Financial Elite Zombies Threatening the World

There is no zombie free lunch

The financial plans of Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke will drain life and energy from the rest of the planet, says Krzysztof Rybinski.

Krzysztof Rybinski is a partner in Ernst & Young and assistant professor at the Warsaw School of Economics. He was deputy governor of the National Bank of Poland (March 2004-January 2008). His website is here

I urge everyone to read the brilliant, hilarious, science-fiction horror story version of how U.S. decision-makers are managing the global economic crisis written by the imaginative but very, very serious Polish economist Krzystof Rybinski.

In particular, I urge Americans to read his essay: get out of your shell and see how the recession that the dynamic duo New York financiers & Washington politicians is bringing to a main street near you (wherever you live on this little globe of ours). It is quite revealing to see the U.S. from the perspective of a thinker who lives elsewhere.

In fact, I would have reprinted the whole article on my website under the marvelous Creative Commons license that the Open Democracy global affairs analysis site adheres to, but that license requires that one simply reprint articles ... without "building on" them. But "building on" this insightful essay is exactly what we should be doing because it ties the whole global complex system together, showing how Americans--the richest large society on earth--are exploiting all the rest. More, the essay hints (very gently) at the global financial pain that will be felt by many (perhaps even Americans, eventually, since things are connected in a complex system) if U.S. decision-makers continue to borrow from the world to pay off exploitative members of the American financial elite.

So, read the article, then return here, and we will see if we can build on it to explore its implications.




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