It’s all bad, you hear me?! Just listen to these people…
“It’s all basically going down the drain”
“I don’t know what to do any more”
“My job’s gone, my car has gone, my life’s finished”
Which makes it ever so subversive of me to suggest that the economic “crisis” is not a crisis at all: never has been, never will be. My reason for saying so is based on the relative scale of one “crisis” over another: let’s say, for instance, that you are about to go out and the heel has come off your favourite pair of shoes – a fashion crisis perhaps, or if you are already late, then a temporal crisis could be the outcome, especially if are going on a really hot date.
While you are out, someone in your street has suffered from a heart attack; you have no idea this has happened until you get back home — having turned up a bit late and endured a rash comment about your choice of shoes — and see the slowly flashing lights of the ambulance.
In economic terms, the collapse of Lehman’s, the takeover of HBOS and Merrill Lynch, and the gravity-obeying drop of AIG could be considered a crisis. Certainly no such series of events has been recorded in the financial world for a great deal of time, if ever — although perhaps those working on the trading floors of the great financial centres in October 1987 might have something to say about that. Nevertheless, if you are an amphibian (or a bird, or an aquatic mammal, or a human, for that matter), then why the hell would a fall in the value of a few corporations be comparable to the fact that half of Europe’s frog species could have been wiped out by 2050?!
On the other hand, maybe the collapse of a chunk of the economic system could be the difference between life and death for the aforementioned amphibians; or could slow down the accelerating loss of the Amazon rainforest; or could reduce the shrinking of the Arctic ice sheets…for it is economic growth and the concurrent, uncontrollable growth in energy and resource consumption, that is driving the global environmental breakdown.
And that is a crisis: perhaps the only one that matters.