Alright, I admit it. There's a part of me that just doesn't care that the entire global financial system is crashing around us. When I first got phone calls from reporters in panic about Bear Stearns, then about Fannie and Freddy and now about Lehman, AIG and the host of other companies now in trouble, it was difficult for me to respond to their panic with the urgency that they thought it all deserved. Hell, I couldn't even feel much sympathy for them. Here are some of the reasons why:
1) You've made your bed, now you lie in it. While it's true that many of us working folks have our 401k's and pension funds invested in the stock market, about 45% of all stock is owned by the richest 1% of households. Those are the same folks who lauded deregulation above all, who built up this fictitious house of cards and played monopoly with their money (and with some of ours). Those folks have more than enough money to bail themselves and everyone else out of this mess, and if we had a functioning regulatory framework, they would be forced to do so. If they had any sense, the rich folks would realize that to do so would be in their enlightened self interest - after all they're rebuilding the system that put them where they are in the first place. But privatize profits and socialize costs, as any good crony capitalist would say.
As for the rest of us...
2) The boom times weren't great for U.S. workers. While CEOs have been seeing massive pay rises from the 1980s until now - sometimes as much as 50% in a single year - real wages have been more or less flat since about 1973. So while the size of the pie was growing, the percentage that went to ordinary folks went down and those at the top were pigging out. And that's for those of us in the U.S. (the richest country in the world) who were lucky enough to have a decent job during the boom times. Workers at wall mart or the always significant homeless population had it even worse.
As for those in other countries:
3) Market fundamentalist policies had destroyed the chances of development for much of the rest of the world. Since about 1980, the IMF and the World Bank started pushing their structural adjustment programs onto the rest of the world. The policies of liberalization, privatization and budget austerity ostensibly were to improve the chances for foreign investment to fuel growth. In reality, the only cases I can think of where foreign investment has had anything to do with growth usually involve tourism.
What these policies did in practice was to make countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia dependent on U.S. consumption. So African countries export cotton, coffee, sugar, cocoa, etc. to U.S. and European companies for manufacturing into finished products, ultimately for our consumption. Not only is this system highly vulnerable to any downturn in the U.S. economy (like the one we're having right now), it also destroys any chance countries have of actually developing. As Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang shows in his Bad Samaritans, no country in the world developed without some combination of massive public investment in infant industry, tariffs and subsidies.
Which brings me to the main reason I can't really think of the last few weeks/months/years as a crisis:
4) The entire system economic system has been toxic for vast numbers of people and has threatened to destroy the global ecosystem
While some folks I admire, including George Monbiot, have been advocating for a massive investment in green technology as a way of both saving capitalism and saving the environment, I've never really believed that. A premise at the root of our growth-oriented economy is that the world has infinite resources and can serve as an infinite garbage can. That's obviously a flawed premise, and as long as a system based on that premise is in place, we as a species will always be the stupid dog shitting right where it eats, or the predator that eats up all its prey and then goes extinct itself.
In more human terms, according to some estimates, nearly 30,000 children a day are dying from preventable disease. A further 13,000 children a day are dying from malnutrition. An estimate that Johan Galtung sometimes tosses around (though I have yet to find documentation for it) is that 125,000 people per day are killed as a direct result of the economic system we have in place. Given these circumstances, doesn't it seem a little vain to say that what we've gone through in the last few weeks is an economic catastrophe?