America's Financial Meltdown: How has it affected your life?

The great thing about being an accountant is that when the rest of the economy goes to shit there's plenty of insolvency work to do (As an accountant in practice rather than industry of course).

As an outsider looking in, I'd suggest that America's fortunes won't improve any until people realise that their old way of life was unsustainable. America has been a very wasteful country resources-wise for a long time (Even more so than most European countries and we're hardly angels over here) and you have standards of living that exceed your current ability to sustain them. What's needed is a general shift in outlook and opinions. People need to realise that they can't just have whatever they want when they want it and companies need to modernise and adapt, rather than try to spend their way through troubled times without changing anything.

Take the auto industry for example. Rather than taking hand-outs from the government to stay in business, your car firms need to make themselves more attractive to a global market. American made cars aren't at all popular outside of America because, frankly, they're a bit rubbish. Although there are American owned companies operating outside of the USA, the design and manufacture work is done abroad too. The Fords we drive over here are designed and made in Britain and Europe for example. Now previously this hasn't been an issue, America was a big enough market for cars that it didn't matter that you couldn't build them to go round corners or do anything over 15 mpg because that's what people in America apparently want from a car. Now there's no money left and nobody's buying new cars, especially not ones that need filling up every 100 miles. Rather than pump money into the industry and hope it'll miraculously survive churning out the same old SUVs, your car companies need to start thinking about designing new cars that appeal to the current market (Cheaper, more efficient) or that can be sold abroad. Sadly, the rest of the world, in particular the Japanese are years ahead of you.

That's just one example obviously but I really believe that without a general shift of opinions you're going to struggle indefinitely. Unfortunately, being such a stupidly large country with so many levels of infrastructure to try to pass change through makes the proposition incredibly difficult. In England we can adapt a lot quicker becuase there's not that many of us and people are largely disillusioned with the political system and largely ingnorant of the wider effects of proposed legislation. Stuff gets forced through and nobody complains until it's too late. Provided we're being governed by people who know what they're doing it's a great system, sadly at the moment we have a bunch of think tanks and ad agencies running things so the country is pretty fucked...

Jam it back in, in the dark.