Desperate times call for......

This being summer internship season in many business schools, we get to hear from a lot of companies who visit our campus and tell us about themselves and what they are looking from us when they hire us.

So a very big iBank came visiting today to loud thumps, and reiteration of the love they had for us and our institute had for them. Eventually things moved onto what they do, and how they survived the markets and the sentiment. Things got interesting in the questions and answers round, and people had a lot of questions about the changes in their work culture now that they are under different regulatory control in the United States, because obviously things will be different. Somebody asked a question about the survival of the big western companies and the western governments coming together to save them, including buying their bad assets and taking stakes in them. The speaker remarked that desperate times call for desperate measures. That is when the thought struck me - There is a system that everybody believes in, and the system messes up. Now the believers of the system will go against the very tenets of the system to get back to the system that messed up.

Let me repeat it again, the believers of a system that fucks up will go against exactly what the system says to come back to the system.

Also, apparently President Sarkozy, in a 'summit' of great European powers, has called for a sovereign wealth fund of the European nations to fight back the "foreign predators." Who are the foreign predators? The people who the western man buys his oil from. I don't want to sound like a bleeding heart anti-globalization leftist, but I think this is exactly how i feel about the way western capitalism works - they will do business with the third world, but only on their own terms. How many instances can I line up - their stance at the WTO, their economic clarion calls against their good jobs going to the developing world, and now this - how dare Arab money enter the western bastions of economy and commerce, they are only good till their oil lasts.

Some economic system this. What I liked best about the presenter's words was when he said in reference to the world's economic scenario, that India will fight its battles, but not this way, and it will win it's battles. Amen to that.