August 10, 2008

This is a day that forever changed my life. My boyfriend and I both took a "mental health day" from work and while cuddling in bed I watched as Lehman Brothers fell, then Bear Sterns, followed by the rest of Wall St. thanks to the horrible greed and avarice these companies were allowed to commit due to lax regulatory laws of sub-prime mortgage packages and other financial instruments such as option betting that deceived millions of people around the world and led ultimately to the Great Depression/Recession of the modern era.

I trained all my life with the unending belief that if I could give one thing to the world, it would be to educate and help others manage their financial life with the understanding that better financial management makes it possible to put your kids in college, retire, pay your debts and own a home. I genuinely believed so naively that I could make a difference in this world and by this time I was in my Junior year of a Bachelors degree in Economics when it all fell apart.

I was devastated. The only equivalent I can provide is it was like having your heart broken and falling out of love all in one day. Suddenly I was without a plan, I had no next move. My entire faith in our "sound" financial system had been shattered and honestly I still don't have it back. So I have an Econ degree that I'm not using. I grew up fascinated by how the events of the 1929 Great Depression happened and perhaps I was naive to believe that we would actually learn something from that hard lesson; sadly we didn't. We got greedy and suddenly everyone who wanted it could get a mortgage, never mind that they were irresponsible and shouldn't have done it in the first place but it was everyone in on it. I remember at the height of the bubble before it burst I worked in a realtor's office and saw just how the entire system worked and guess what.....it didn't. The events that led to our 2nd truly Great Depression was both on the fault of the persons who failed to act reasonably and take responsibility for their actions and not sign a mortgage they knew they couldn't pay for, and a government that failed to impose credit controls to regulate this industry. As someone who has studied in depth economics, it is my firm belief that you need both a free market WITH regulatory controls, no other system will work. Also for those who aren't already aware, it is "normal" for our economy to go through peaks and valleys, so long as they don't go to extremes.

I think the sheer horror of what happened on 9/11 and its aftermath made the economy take a backseat. Understandable, but not acceptable. Since this day I still haven't completely figured out my path in life yet, and there's a huge part of me that wants to get back the passion for this industry I loved, and another part of me that says its time to move on. So I did. I became a writer. I have a book coming out in October of this year and yet I still wonder if I'll ever feel the way I did before this economic collapse took away my faith in mankind. There has always been greed and there will always be, but we as a people need to come together to bring our voice to those responsible and ensure this cannot happen again.

We are now seeing the resentment of that anger still reverberating today with the "Occupy Wall Street" protests going on now. The media has been asking what they want, but I know what it is - fairness. It's just that simple. That protest is about the single parent working 2 or 3 jobs to support their kids just to make ends meet. Or the unemployed worker (underemployed) with skills but cannot get hired. It's about the factory worker who watches helpless as their job is shipped overseas and within 3 months loses their home. It's about the reason we all wake up in the morning and go to work, to improve our own lives and those of our loved ones. It's a basic human need that we've somehow lost the ability to feel anymore. We need to remember why we're all here and why we work, its to live, not to see our futures shattered. It has been said that compound interest is the greatest force in the world and while that may be true, but compared to avarice I beg to differ. Greed is the greatest force in this world - period.

Children

Lately my boyfriend and I have been discussing children in the next few years so I'm posing a question to all you parents out there, how differently did your life change after you had your child? If you could go back and do it all over again would you knowing what you know today?