The restructuring in America will be great

FEATURE: "Help Wanted: The U.S. has 3 million jobs going begging. Why that may not be good for the economy," by Peter Coy, BusinessWeek, 11 May 2009.

13 million unemployed and 3 million jobs unfilled, evidence of "serious mismatches between workers and employees."

Up goes education, accounting, health care and government and down goes construction, finance and retail.

Comments

[Louis Heberlein]

Originally, perhaps using Renaissance as a benchmark, money market/bank functions were designed to allow merchants, craft activities and farmers to pool financial surplus financial assets ($, credits etc.) to draw upon them, or gain short term loans for future business needs. Then, and later again and again, the users of financial systems, did not understand the system (and risk if it was poorly executed). The Christian establishment saw the finance functions as beneath them, and left the process to Merchant of Venice type Jews.

But it was later, as the Western economies became more complicated and sophisticated, that that the real Western financial wheeler dealers emerged that often made the financial system the primary aspect of an economy rather than a support structure. There have been several centuries in which Western economies crashed because of misuse and misvalue of financial products. Financial reforms followed and then rotted due to being considered obsolete, or were circumvented by trickery.

In our last fiasco, excess construction and retail sales (supported by crazy consumer credit gimmicks) were used a phony foundation for a tall pyramid with the financial toys at the top.

Now we have the opportunity to focus on investment, education and labor on tangible products and services that were ignored during the recent phony economy cycles.

Two aspects with broad implications that gets little media attention involve the technology and techniques of The Smart Grid and nanotechnology.