Financial Crisis

As most people know there are huge financial crisis going on in the world as I write this. Even though I focused on economy during secondary school I have absolutely no idea how so many people can lose that much money in such a short time, regardless of their place of residence on this little thing called planet earth. I guess we will see thousands of books written about what is happening these days, but fortunately I won´t read any of them.

Anyways, I am from Iceland, which is a relatively small island with only 320.000 people (considering Iceland is geographically bigger than England it is maybe not so small, but that is another story)

Here is the thing. About ten years ago, the three biggest banks in the country (owned by the government) were denationalized. All the banks suddenly grew enormously fast and the owners became billionaires in a short time etc.

Two months ago, all of the banks were nationalized. The one thing that sparked it all was that the Federal Reserve of Iceland denied one of the banks of a loan of 500million Euros, which is a decent amount of money in a country with only $12.274 billion in GDP.

Well, I´ve got news for you, business is about trust and credibility, especially the bank system which seems now to be based on loans and debts of the world´s population. Because the Federal Reserve wouldn´t loan the bank this amount (and rightly so - otherwise I would be a slave for the rest of my life), the bank system collapsed in a week. All of the banks creditors shut them off and the rest is history. That means that all the stocks become worthless resulting in tens of thousands of people losing their life savings (because they had been tricked to invest in stocks so the banks could expand more and sink into more debts).

Of course most people had no idea about the banks financial status until everything was gone, and so it appeared that those three banks had foreign debts that paralleled three times the GDP of the country, which is of course aboslutely crazy.

Now I am slowly getting to my main point. One of those banks (Landsbankinn) did business in the UK, and the total amount on the savings accounts only, owned by people in the UK, was $500millions. That is a pretty high number given the fact you owe it to somebody, and you have no money.

There were a lot of things that went on between the British and the Icelandic government and to put a long story into few words Gordon Brown, GBR´s Prime Minister, enforced terrorist law over my country which had of course serious consequences. A couple of weeks later he revoked the law and apoligized but still he´s not welcome because of the harm he did.

The bottom line is that my currency dropped by 50% in one month, the unemployment rate will increase by 5% in the next two months, and billions of dollars went down the sink.

I just wanted to post this because I think the whole situation is a good example of "how not to run business" and is also a good example of incredibly unethical business methods.

P.S. I didn´t check for grammar errors because it´s late and I also don´t want to read this because it´s too depressing.

History Will Be Made

It's about 9:05pm on November 4, 2008. As I sit on the edge of my chair watching MSNBC, I am getting goosebumps. In years to come, I can say I witnessed and was a part of history. I am a proud supporter of Obama and I am ready for a change. No matter who wins there will still be a story to tell when I am older. For once, I am excited about politics. I find myself glued to either to the television or the Internet wondering what is going on with the election. On yesterday, I voted and it felt good. A right that I exercised proudly. Some may say that Barack Obama isn't experienced enough but it isn't about experience with me. It's about your platform and what you believe. I believe that Obama is the change that America needs. OBAMA 08!!!!!!!!!

A situation came up the other day that I thought was interesting. One of my friends works in HR at a company. One of the employees (and her friend) was being overworked by her supervisor. She went into his office and said she was feeling overwhelmed. The supervisor then fired her and physically pushed her out of his office. The employee then went home and filed charges against the supervisor and was suing. She told my friend this and the company did not know. Do you think she was morally liable to notify the company of the charges?

Corporate Downsizing

The place i was recently working at closed up shop saying that their lease expired, but they did not move anywhere else and never notified the employees, leaving them to come to work and see that everything was moved out during the night. They did not give up any information before hand so the employees could look elsewhere. I understand this is not leagally wrong but i believe this is definitly ethically wrong. Any ideas/comments?

-Brian

corporations political influence on youth right or wrong?

Over the past couple weeks, along with prior elections, I have been noticing MTV's biased opinions towards the democratic party. They claim that they have no affiliation with either party and are not biased in any way. They push the power of voting in almost all of their programs and commercials yet they bias it towards the democratic party. Most of the time they just hint towards voting democrat but last night they came right out and said vote for obama and mentioned nothing of the republican party. I understand that many corporations take a stand politically and contribute to one party or the other but do you feel like it is right for a corporation that has such a huge impact on todays youth to bias it in one direction rather than the other? I feel like they unfairly influence the young voters who look up to the famous people that are reguarly on the tv station. I think that they should push the right to vote but dont try to pursuade uninformed voters to vote democrat just because "diddy" says so or because thats what the cool or famous people are doing. They should promote them to look at the issues at hand rather than the "everybody's doing it," peer pressure influence they are promoting.

-Brian D