Globalization and you...

I don't envy that much from my parents/grandparents lifetimes but one thing I wish I had a chance to experience is their level of financial simplicity compared to the complete macro-economic boondoggle that we have to deal with in my day and age. 

In our parents hay-day, a husband’s job at the mill was enough to comfortably support a family of four. His wife didn't have to work. They had a house.  Everyone was fed and they could even take a vacation every year.  Now, a family of four, trying to live off of one parent, working at any sort of mill, is impossible unless that family likes living in the back seat of a car, not eating and finding the idea of a vacation laughable

When our parents got paid, they put their money in a bank, and that's where their money stayed, literally in that bank.  If they found a good enough bank, that was good enough with their, at the time, well managed, advisable investments, they could yield 8 or 9% interest on their money that they put in.   Basically, their bank was their 401K.   Now, if you can get a bank to give you a quarter every month for your trouble, you're way ahead of the curve.  Most people end up giving the banks money now for the privilege of holding onto our money.

I also use the phrase, "holding onto our money very loosely".  While there are still a few reputable financial institutions out there, most manage your money about as well as a compulsive alcoholic gambler. Within milliseconds of your direct deposit hitting your account that money is immediately thrown into the dark, foreboding world of global trading. 

Back in our parents days, globalization was laughable, as it should be today so their banks invested in local economies, which gained higher yields on their money, which benefited everyone around them.  This drove down costs of living, put more money in everyone’s pocket, increased employment, fed kids, the system worked. 

Now, over the years, as we have "Globalized", our banks, the drunken gamblers that they are, have been gifted a whole world of financial games to play with your money.  The money that would have been invested in small local business's 40 years ago may now be invested in a carrot enterprise in Greece, or a concrete company out of Moscow or even bundled up into packages that Steven Hawking can't decode and sold to other banks.  The end result is delusion of your dollar at a borderline criminal level. You get no interest for your money, your money is worth less, your cost of living increases, both parents have to work, and everyone is pissed off.

Now, most people blame the investment bankers themselves for this fiasco.  This is fine, because it really is their fault however, I also blame the people who empower them, mainly the "World" Banks and the botched up Federal Reserve System, but that is a different story entirely.  Good old fashioned human arrogance is a major player in this disaster.  People, with doctorates in economics, who have studied global markets and trading schemes for decades of their lives, admit that they still don't have a handle on the asinine complexities of our global, macro-economic system.  But for every one of these people who are humbled by this spider-web of revenue streams and market futures, there are a hundred others who think that they have tamed this beast.  They are so, incredibly arrogant and stupid, that they actually believe that they understand a system that interweaves everyone’s money and nearly every company, in the entire world.  This, inevitably, leads to them making terrible decisions with everyone’s money and then you end up eating Ramen Noodles for dinner. 

Globalization helps major corporations as it opens so many more options for them to acquire assets throughout the entire planet instead of in their immediate region.  This is really where the party ends. Defenders of globalization will tell you how "it prevents wars" and "aids the developing world".  How can this be true?  How can diluting the world currencies to a point where everyone has less money help the developing world?  Has it helped the developing world?  Is anything better in the "Developing World" since we have implemented this system?  Should we ask Egypt and Libya how they feel about globalization?  Globalization may prevent wars between two countries, but it is not doing much to prevent wars between governments and their own people.  Any system that costs people money and jobs will harbor this sort of behavior.  Every time, that American's have to take a hit within their 401K because some Eastern European country can't grow enough tomatoes this month, is another step towards this end.  Personally, I would rather just have to have a war with some random country every 20 years then have to worry about the monster that is a planet full of pissed off citizens.

We live in a global economy and it sucks.  It doesn't seem to be benefiting anyone in a positive way with the exception of people who are already extraordinarily rich.  Even when the opportunity was ripe to let it disappear we gave the people who caused it more money than they needed to get it back on track, billions more.  It's as though we are all on steam engine, on a collision course with a mountain and we just keep shoveling coal into the fire even though we are all well aware that we're going to crash and die.

It could get better; we just need the entire world to have as good of an economy as we do.  That's not unrealistic, right?  I could totally see Afghanistan managing to diversify their opium driven economy or hundreds of years of lazy, transient culture going away because our major companies in the developed world want to keep globalizing. 

No, this will never happen.  But companies want you to keep thinking it will.  They want you to honestly believe that you are going to get more money in your pocket someday because a company in the Balkans sold a few grapes to a French Winery that puts it’s wine in bottles that are made in the US.  When in reality, more often than not, a drought would have hit the company in the Balkans, preventing them from growing grapes, which were then not shipped to the French winery causing them to cancel the order of bottles from the US, putting that company over the edge financially, forcing them to fire your neighbors.  Any system, with this many moving parts, can’t work, ever.