Dear Editor,

For many years, I’ve had nothing but admiration for the United States’ financial system. I went around, like so many others, proclaiming it to be the gold standard of capitalism. Was and is it all a façade? Are the Americans the greatest illusionists in the world? One can certainly make a convincing case that they are. How could an entire financial sector collapse to the extent that it has in the US? How could private sector companies be billions of dollars in the red and still pay CEO’s fantastic salaries and/or dole out ridiculous sums on other remuneration and pensions schemes? How did all those Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and other Ivy League graduates get it so wrong? Is the business education system in the US also pulling wool over our eyes? 

The irony of this entire debacle is that the chief capitalist and democratic crusader has had to turn to a semi-socialist and authoritarian regime in China to finance and save it from impending humiliation. This fact has not stopped the US from pretending that it has unlimited funds to subsidize massive “bailouts” of its private sector. Oh well, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Yours faithfully,
Clinton Urling