article from ny times

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/weekinreview/23anand.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&goback=.hom

dig the frontier of our past

November 23, 2008
The World
India Calling
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
VERLA, India
“WHAT are Papa and I doing here?”
These words, instant-messaged by my mother in a suburb of Washington, D.C., whizzed through the deep-ocean cables and came to me in the village where I’m now living, in the country that she left.
It was five years ago that I left America to come live and work in India. Now, in our family and among our Indian-American friends, other children of immigrants are exploring motherland opportunities. As economies convulse in the West and jobs dry up, the idea is spreading virally in émigré homes.
Which raises a heart-stirring question: If our parents left India and trudged westward for us, if they manufactured from scratch a new life there for us, if they slogged, saved, sacrificed to make our lives lighter than theirs, then what does it mean when we choose to migrate to the place they forsook?
If we are here, what are they doing there?
They came of age in the 1970s, when the “there” seemed paved with possibility and the “here” seemed paved with potholes. As a young trainee, my father felt frustrated in companies that awarded roles based on age, not achievement. He looked at his bosses, 20 years ahead of him in line, and concluded that he didn’t want to spend his life becoming them.
My parents married in India and then embarked to America on a lonely, thrilling adventure. They learned together to drive, shop in malls, paint a house. They decided who and how to be. They kept reinventing themselves, discarding the invention, starting anew. My father became a management consultant, an entrepreneur, a human-resources executive, then a Ph.D. candidate. My mother began as a homemaker, learned ceramics, became a ceramics teacher and then the head of the art department at one of Washington’s best schools.
It was extraordinary, and ordinary: This is what America did to people, what it always has done.
My parents brought us to India every few years as children. I relished time with relatives; but India always felt alien, impenetrable, frozen.
Perhaps it was the survivalism born of scarcity: the fierce pushing to get off the plane, the miserliness even of the rich, the obsession with doctors and engineers and the neglect of all others. Perhaps it was the bureaucracy, the need to know someone to do anything. Or the culture shock of servitude: a child’s horror at reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in an American middle school, then seeing servants slapped and degraded in India.
My firsthand impression of India seemed to confirm the rearview immigrant myth of it: a land of impossibilities. But history bends and swerves, and sometimes swivels fully around.
India, having fruitlessly pursued command economics, tried something new: It liberalized, privatized, globalized. The economy boomed, and hope began to course through towns and villages shackled by fatalism and low expectations.
America, meanwhile, floundered. In a blink of history came 9/11, outsourcing, Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, rising economies, rogue nuclear nations, climate change, dwindling oil, a financial crisis.
Pessimism crept into the sunniest nation. A vast majority saw America going astray. Books heralded a “Post-American World.” Even in the wake of a historic presidential election, culminating in a dramatic change in direction, it remained unclear whether the United States could be delivered from its woes any time soon.
“In the U.S., there’s a crisis of confidence,” said Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys Technologies, the Indian software giant. “In India,” he added, “for the first time after decades or centuries, there is a sense of optimism about the future, a sense that our children’s futures can be better than ours if we try hard enough.”
My love for the country of my birth has never flickered. But these new times piqued interest in my ancestral land. Many of us, the stepchildren of India, felt its change of spirit, felt the gravitational force of condensed hope. And we came.
Exact data on émigrés working in India or spending more time here are scarce. But this is one indicator: India unveiled an Overseas Citizen of India card in 2006, offering foreign citizens of Indian origin visa-free entry for life and making it easier to work in the country. By this July, more than 280,000 émigrés had signed up, according to The Economic Times, a business daily, including 120,000 from the United States.
At first we felt confused by India’s formalities and hierarchies, by British phraseology even the British had jettisoned, by the ubiquity of acronyms. We wondered what newspapers meant when they said, “INSAT-4CR in orbit, DTH to get a boost.” (Apparently, it meant a satellite would soon beam direct-to-home television signals.)
Working in offices, some of us were perplexed to be invited to “S&M conferences,” only to discover that this denoted sales and marketing. Several found to their chagrin that it is acceptable for another man to touch your inner thigh when you crack a joke in a meeting.
We learned new expressions: “He is on tour” (Means: He is traveling. Doesn’t mean: He has joined U2.); “What is your native place?” (Means: Where did your ancestors live? Doesn’t mean: What hospital delivered you?); “Two minutes” (Means: An hour. Doesn’t mean: Two minutes.).
We tried to reinvent ourselves, as our parents had, but in reverse. Some studied Hindi, others yoga. Some visited the Ganges to find themselves; others tried days-long meditations.
Many of us who shunned Indian clothes in youth began wearing kurtas and chappals, saris and churidars. There was a sad truth in this: We had waited for our heritage to become cool to the world before we draped its colors and textures on our own backs.
We learned how to make friends here, and that it requires befriending families. We learned to love here: Men found fondness for the elusive Indian woman; women surprised themselves in succumbing to chauvinistic, mother-spoiled men.
We forged dual-use accents. We spoke in foreign accents by default. But when it came to arguing with accountants or ordering takeout kebabs, we went sing-song Indian.
We gravitated to work specially suited to us. If there is a creative class, in Richard Florida’s phrase, there is also emerging what might be called a fusion class: people positioned to mediate among the multiple societies that claim them.
India’s second-generation returnees have built boutiques that fuse Indian fabrics with Western cuts, founded companies that train a generation to work in Western companies, become dealmakers in investment firms that speak equally to Wall Street and Dalal Street, mixed albums that combine throbbing tabla with Western melodies.
Our parents’ generation helped India from afar. They sent money, advised charities, guided hedge-fund dollars into the Bombay Stock Exchange. But most were too implicated in India to return. Our generation, unscathed by it, was freer to embrace it.
Countries like India once fretted about a “brain drain.” We are learning now that “brain circulation,” as some call it, may be more apt.
India did not export brains; it invested them. It sent millions away. In the freedom of new soil, they flowered. They seeded a new generation that, having blossomed, did what humans have always done: chase the frontier of the future.
Which just happened, for many of us, to be the frontier of our own pasts.

So now the US govt. has started to buy up credit card debt, too, in addition to mortgages.
Wonder where will it end....

A lot of people are asking why can't the govt. write off their debt too?

In the end, the tax payer ends up footing the bill for the greediness of banks and the irresponsible lifestyle of some people.

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"Mah deah, there is much more money to be made in the destruction of civilization than in building it up."

-- Rhett Butler in "Gone with the Wind"

US to see four quarters of nasty recession: Report

The ongoing recession inflicting the world's largest economy will engulf four quarters into a negative growth rate and might lead to surging unemployment rates through 2010, a new report said on Thursday.


In its fourth quarterly report of 2008, the UCLA Anderson Forecast, a keenly watched economic outlook, today said that the positive growth rates after four quarters of negative growth would also be "very tepid."

"The news from the economy is bad... The recession we had previously hoped to avoid is now with us in full gale force," UCLA Anderson Forecast Senior Economist David Shulman said.

The UCLA Anderson Forecast now expects that real Growth Domestic Product (GDP) will decline by 4.1 per cent in the current quarter, followed by respective declines of 3.4 per cent and 0.8 per cent in the first two quarters of 2009.

In addition, the unemployment rate is forecast to rise from 6.5 per cent recorded in October 2008 to 8.5 per cent by late 2009 or early 2010.

Besides the rising unemployment rate, there would be a total of two million job losses over the next 12 months.

The report noted that the blame for this "nasty recession" goes to the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the economic circumstances underlying current conditions differed significantly from the past recessions.

It further noted that the "global economy is in its first synchronized recession since the early 1990s," as Europe and Japan are also in recession while China and India are suffering growth slowdowns, which, in turn, negatively impact US exports.

UCLA Anderson Forecast, which is a unit of leading business school UCLA Anderson School of Management, claims to be that it has been credited as the first major US economic forecasting group to declare the recession of 2001.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/US_to_see_four_quarters_of_nasty_recession_Report/articleshow/3824796.cms

Keep well,

Cheers!

Bankrupt Circuit City Stores Inc., unable to work out a sale of the company, says it will go out of business – closing its 567 U.S. stores and cutting 30,000 jobs.

The second-biggest consumer electronics retailer in the U.S. is the latest casualty of an unprecedented pullback in consumer spending that has driven other brands such as Mervyns LLC and Linens 'N Things into bankruptcy. Experts believe there will be more to come.

http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/572663

Not Even Bailout Funds Can Burnish Banks' Image

Not even a fresh influx of government money could reverse investor sentiment regarding the banking industry.

While news that Bank of America [BAC 7.18 -1.14 (-13.7%) ] was getting $20 billion in bailout funding to prop up its balance sheet initially cheered investors, the mood quickly turned as it became apparent that it might not be enough.

And BofA's troubles were merely reflecting the rest of the sector's woes. European bank Barclays [BCS 7.25 -1.15 (-13.69%) ] lost about a third of its stock value, HSBC [HBC 39.95 -0.38 (-0.94%) ] continued to come under pressure, and Citigroup [C 3.50 -0.33 (-8.62%) ] continued its slide even as the company desperately sought to assure the market that it was adjusting its model to meet future needs.

"People are afraid to trust anything," says Kathy Boyle, president of Chapin Hill Advisors in New York. "You've got a lot of issues here that aren't going away quickly and they're going to have to absorbed quickly. That's going to translate into losses for these institutions."

From an investors standpoint, there will be little incentive to jump back into the stocks of the nation's big banks.

"I don't know where the end is going to be," Boyle says. "I don't know where it's going to turn around, but it's going to take a long time before these banks turn profitable again. You're going to see more mergers and more creative efforts to try to stir business up."

While some analysts were taking a wait-and-see approach on BofA's problems, investors are dumping the stock in droves.

Unless the pendulum swings quickly, earnings could well be a precursor to a blistering round of bank closings.

"There's certainly going to be more bank failures in 2009 as the economic backdrop continues to deteriorate and the smaller banks start to feel the pain," said Christopher Mustascio, managing director at Stifel Nicolaus. "Now you've got a full-fledged recession...Some of these banks are not going to be able to deal with that, and you're going to see failures."

The $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, which banks can access to bolster their capital positions, will help ease some of the damage as will Federal Reserve moves to ease monetary policy. The liquidity moves of 2008 have lagging effects that should take root in the coming months.

But banks will fail, and at numbers large enough to cause alarm.

"I do think some of the actions taken by both the Fed and Treasury will limit the failure, especially at the larger banks, that we have seen in the late '80s or early '90s," Mustascio said. "But to think we're not going to see more failures in 2009 is probably naive."

http://www.cnbc.com/id/28694605

Keep well,

Cheers!

Reboot of global economy and War

The “recovery” that never really FELT like a recovery for most of America is over.

You have a computer. Occasionally the computer will crash and you have to reboot it. That will happen to the global economy and global economy need rebooting. Before this happens there will be much more money printing because basically the central banks are willing to do that. US Less Than 3 Years Away From Being Greece

The time left for the United States to reach similar debt levels as those of Greece was just a few years.
In the past 2 years, Greece has roughly failed to pay its debt 2 times, with the ratio of its debt to GNP increasing from 100 % to 150%. A calamity could be averted well in time due to bailout packages given successively by the IMF and the European Union.


A mooted third round of quantitative easing (QE3) in the U.S. on the its way just to kick the can further down the road.


By printing money, problems are not solved, but they can be postponed, and they become larger. More money printing is merely deferring a crisis.

The next crisis will be far bigger, larger and greater and that could end in war


Enjoy Life's pleasures!

Cheers!

Quote:

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Originally posted by ashedfc

Quote:

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Originally posted by Heart Stealer

Reboot of global economy and War

The “recovery” that never really FELT like a recovery for most of America is over.

You have a computer. Occasionally the computer will crash and you have to reboot it. That will happen to the global economy and global economy need rebooting. Before this happens there will be much more money printing because basically the central banks are willing to do that. US Less Than 3 Years Away From Being Greece

The time left for the United States to reach similar debt levels as those of Greece was just a few years.
In the past 2 years, Greece has roughly failed to pay its debt 2 times, with the ratio of its debt to GNP increasing from 100 % to 150%. A calamity could be averted well in time due to bailout packages given successively by the IMF and the European Union.


A mooted third round of quantitative easing (QE3) in the U.S. on the its way just to kick the can further down the road.


By printing money, problems are not solved, but they can be postponed, and they become larger. More money printing is merely deferring a crisis.

The next crisis will be far bigger, larger and greater and that could end in war


Enjoy Life's pleasures!

Cheers!

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Isn't this exactly what Dr. Marc Faber has mentioned in his recent interview.

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