THE AUSTERITY EARTHQUAKE: FINANCIAL PARAMEDICS TO THE RESCUE
Imagine a town in which there has been a severe earthquake. The authorities decide that the town hall has to be rebuilt – the edifice was badly damaged, many of the staff have been killed or injured, their families are hanging on a shoestring. Funds are made available by foreign governments and official institutions, including international funds, so that the town hall can be put back together again. The rescue efforts are hampered by continuing earth tremors, which constantly indicate that the problems are still worse than imagined. Despite the size of the rescue operation, and the oft repeated promises that more foreign resources will be forthcoming as long as the rebuilding program stays on course, people connected with the town hall remain skeptical and confidence is at an all time low.
But there is not enough public money to tackle more than the town hall and its occupants. Who is going to help the many thousands of private institutions, buildings and people who are in desperate need? These entities and people, that in fact represent the large majority of those affected, must rely on a mix of:
- Any favorable spinoffs from the town hall reconstruction and development
- What they can muster from their own skills and resources
- Help from “para” groups of all kinds, ranging from paramedics through parafiremen, on to para financiers.
The challenge for these para groups is threefold. They must offer immediate, absolutely credible tools which the townspeople can use to improve their short term lot. They must demonstrate, at the practical level, mechanisms which the townspeople can use to strengthen their own communications and business, thereby raising confidence. And they must show that, through working together like this, the townspeople can effectively teach the town hall characters what is required to avoid any repetition of the earthquake.
This rebuilding process is very messy. The townspeople are suspicious of just about everyone else, not to mention each other. The foreign authorities are suspected of designing a reconstruction program to suit their own interests. Those who have been running the town hall are doubly guilty – it was their lack of integrity and skill that contributed heavily to the earthquake in the first place, and they are likely to be creaming off from the assistance money after the disaster has struck. What of the foreign paras? These guys should always be looked at askance. What’s in it for them? How are they going to collect profits from our misfortune? All three groups are widely expected to run away when their own interests have been served. While they scamper off, the townspeople stay – they hardly have another option.
The rebuilding will be long and arduous. To carry it through requires nurturing confidence and trust. It also requires some kind of vision. For the town will never be the same again. Those who are young today will not forget how their dreams were shattered, every bit as surely as the buildings. Henceforth they will operate in realms of suspicion and mistrust, the fabric of human relations just as fragile as the land and buildings. For the financiers, obsessed with their accounting, may not comprehend that those most precious yet intangible assets, trust and confidence, are terribly hard to accumulate but can be destroyed only too quickly. The future depends on recreating them every bit as much as it does on reconstructing the physical capital.
Think of Italian earthquakes of recent years, of Tsunamis, of the Japanese nuclear disaster. Our efforts in Greece will be made in similar highly insecure terrain. We must fashion a new para financier brand, a sort of “Financiers sans frontières”.