When the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, I bade my men on board and loose the hawsers. Then they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars; so we sailed on with sorrow in our hearts, but glad to have escaped death though we had lost our comrades.
A famous, and frequent saying from Homer, whose hero Odysseus repeatedly escaped danger by sailing into yet another crisis, and then another, and then…
The Odyssey comes to mind this weekend as I contemplate the continuing financial crisis. This morning, like last Monday, and the one before, the sun will dawn on a different financial world than the one it set on Friday night.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has been busy all weekend, as he has been for months now — “another ruined weekend” — working on acquiring an astonishing degree of power on paper to revitalize the global economy.
It’s a proposal that has been seriously criticized by economists and pundits from across the political spectrum. The blogosphere is uncharacteristically unified in its opposition to Paulson’s proposal (here’s a summary… and another) — a seemingly Putinesque power play – which goes from altering the financial landscape to altering the political landscape.
Here’s what everyone’s really going nuts about:
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
I’m not saying that circumstances don’t call for bold strokes, but Jesus…
Markets might rally on the day, inspired by the rosy promise of an ongoing flow of fresh capital, but for how long until we encounter the next dangerous and unprecedented danger? [Update: further research has confirmed that most dangers are in fact, dangerous -- especially unprecedented ones.]
I hesitate to be any more melodramatic than I already am, and I know that negative predictions in these circumstances can be self-perpetuating, but I seriously get a sense that this is the kind of revolutionary time in which the factions that eventually succeed are not factors at the outset.
Times of upheaval generate their own defining qualities, different from anything that existed before. Ideas that eventually prevail often must emerge from within the crisis.
For the generation too young to have created this mess, our hero isn’t Odysseus, our hero is Telemachus: the son who believed there was still hope for his father and set out to find him, coming of age in the process.
Following Telemachus, we must set out on a new journey to rediscover capitalism, to “save capitalism from the capitalists“* who have been feasting at the expense of our inheritance – just as he set out to find his father via stories and accounts from the heroes who fought with him.
* My early pick for defining quote of 2008: Luigi Zingales, “The time has come to save capitalism from the capitalists.”
