The Children Are In Charge
by Miki SaxonBy Wes Ball. Wes is a strategic innovation consultant and author of The Alpha Factor – a revolutionary new look at what really creates market dominance and self-sustaining success (Westlyn Publishing, 2008) and writes for Leadership Turn every Tuesday. See all his posts here. Wes can be reached at www.ballgroup.com.
The government is changing its mind faster than a three year old.
No wonder the stock market is scared silly.
Let’s get this straight.
In an attempt to help more people gain “the American dream” of owning a home, the U.S. It even went so far as to set up organizations to help resell those loans, so the risk was spread around to unsuspecting investors.
Then, when it looks like some people are being irresponsible with this program, and actually putting people at risk of losing everything, the government says, “Oh, that’s really OK, because it is achieving the goal of putting more people in homes.”
Then, when it all collapses and a lot more than just the 6% of loans that were risky start to go bad, the government says, “Let’s buy up those bad assets and free up the credit markets.” Then, finally, just as the financial industry is starting to believe that perhaps there will be some stability and security ahead, the government changes its mind and decides to focus on consumers and saving a broad range of hurting companies instead, government put pressure on banks to loan money to people who really could not afford it.
Is it any wonder that the stock market is going through such wild swings? Can anyone blame corporate executives for being terrified? With the children running things, who can guess what’s next?
One thing is certain: leadership is supposed to provide vision and a sense of predictability and stability.
Can anyone call what we are seeing “leadership?”
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Image credit: sxc.hu
