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WELL, THANK GOODNESS THAT’S OVER. I DON’T IMAGINE TOO
many of us will miss 2009 and the economic misery it brought. I don’t pretend to understand all the financial sleight-of-hand that briefly enriched a
few before impoverishing many. But while mulling all this over recently, it
occurred to me that the Wall Street investors who created and purchased
those monstrosities actually didn’t understand them any better than I did.
That may explain in part why the deals imploded the way they did. It was
three-card monte taken to the extreme.
In a marvelous new book called Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?
author Michael J. Sandel reflects at one point on Wall Street executives who
defended their enormous bonuses in the face of their enormous failure by
arguing that the recession was caused by forces well
beyond their control. Sandel then asks the pertinent
follow-up question: “If big systemic economic forces
account for the disastrous losses of 2008 and 2009,
couldn’t it be argued that they also account for the dazzling gains of earlier years?” In other words, if, by the
financial executives’ own argument, they don’t deserve
to be penalized in bad times, then they can’t exactly
take credit for the good times either. “Surely the end of
the Cold War, the globalization of trade and capital
markets, the rise of personal computers and the
Internet, and a host of other factors help explain the
success of the financial industry during its run in the
1990s and in the early years of the twenty-first centu-
ry,” he writes. (Sandel’s book offers a cogent overview
of some of the philosophical underpinnings of our economic system. I rec-
ommend it.)
Most of us are at some remove from the high-risk, high-reward, and
potentially calamitous machinations of Wall Street. Yet as we all found out
rather painfully—and for many, the pain is deep and lasting—our economic system links us all inextricably. Down in the trenches where most
logistics and material handling managers work, the consequences were all
too real. Motor carrier bankruptcies, sharp drops in orders for material
handling equipment, excess inventories, the departures of friends and colleagues, and questions about business survival and personal financial well
being touched us all.
In the face of such a severe economic crisis, it is frustrating, to say the
least, to know that doing everything right may not be enough. But if there’s
a bright side to all this, it’s in the personal resilience and fortitude I’ve seen
from so many in this industry who’ve shown themselves to be willing and
able to keep on keeping on.
A PUBLICATION OF
