Losing my religion

2008-10-27T03:31:00Z

Ann Williams examines her faith amid the financial blood and gore.

MR ALAN Greenspan said last week that he has lost faith with free markets. I lost faith in Mr Greenspan a little earlier.

I got to know the chairman of the US Federal Reserve through ten years of tracking and putting together financial news reports for this paper.

I have to admit, he was my American idol.

After all, he was the most powerful central banker in the world. Markets moved when he spoke. His proclamations were taken as reassuring gospel:

- No, there's no bubble in the US housing market, it's just some "froth";

- Yes, the US financial system is sound and all those complex financial derivatives spreading around the world is just a healthy distribution of risk.

After the bubble that didn't exist burst, Mr Greenspan changed tack and said, well, actually, the Fed has no way of spotting bubbles in real time and, anyway, it's more effective to mop up afterwards than to try to deflate a bubble before it bursts.

He was horribly wrong on all counts and we're still trying to mop up the damage.

Some US$16 trillion (S$24 trillion) or about 80 per cent of the value gained by stocks worldwide in the last five years has been wiped out in less than year. The biggest of banks have gone under.

Several currencies and emerging market economies are on the brink of collapse, with the world facing the prospect of a deep recession.

Faced with these facts, Mr Greenspan finally admitted last Thursday that his belief that markets should be left free to regulate themselves was 'flawed'.

As one blogger from the US put it: For Mr Greenspan to admit to being wrong was like the Pope saying the church was based on a lie.

So now we're living through what feels like a scary movie. Here's how the Washington Post descibes it:

'Like the plot of some blockbuster horror movie, the financial crisis shifts from scene to scene with terrifying speed. It opened with a real estate crunch, which hit homeowners and mortgage lenders but left much of the economy unscathed. It continued to a broader banking crunch, in which car loans, business loans and all manner of lending unconnected to real estate suddenly became impossible to obtain.

Now, simultaneously, come three new phases of the turmoil in split-screen Technicolor. The non-financial, or “real,” economy is collapsing. Once-solid emerging markets are imploding. And trading strategies predicated on the robustness of those emerging markets are being dumped hastily, driving brutal volatility in markets around the world.'

One reviewer of the latest slasher movie to hit the cinemas, “Saw V,” has just descibed it as 'the only thing in America offering more blood and gore than the stock market". Haha.

Except I'm having trouble sleeping. It doesn't help that my job is like being a front-seat reviewer of all this financial blood and gore 12 hours a day.

Being human, I keep waiting and hoping for someone to come save us from this mess we're in.

Mr Barack Obama - now he could be The One.

But just as we can't pin the blame for this crisis mess on just one man, I don't think one man can save us.

And that's partly what keeps me awake some days at 3am.

The other part is thinking of my brother, who died three years ago to this day.

I don't think I really felt his sudden death until this month. All the unrelenting bad news, all that feeling of things coming to an end..

It can force you, like Mr Greenspan, to examine your faith, to find it wanting.

And to want something different.

The Straits Times Blogs - Ann Williams

Losing my religion