An author's blog on the recent financial falls

It was interesting to get it on the rediff homepage. The questions can be: Who will bail-out if the Fed goes bust? Why did it chose AIG over Lehman? How about the Indian decoupling phenomenon? Who is to be held responsible-Allan Greenspan for once or a systemic failure per se? What is in Bernarke's mind nowadays? Has the Wall Street been greedy in recent past? What unprecedented sequence of happenings led to this colossal financial catastrophe? And so on and so forth...
Coming back to the title of the post, which talks of an interesting blog for finance novices like me- "The United States is so broke, its people at every level -- from the Federal Reserve on down -- don't know whether to shit or go blind," wrote James Howard Kunstler an American author and social critic - in one of his blogs.

As an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal puts it, "With the benefit of hindsight, everyone can see that the US economy built up an enormous credit bubble that has now popped. . . this bubble was created principally by a Federal Reserve that kept real interest rates too low for too long. In doing so the Fed created a subsidy for debt and a commodity price spike."
The crash has led few of the experts to philosophize by saying c'est la vie or 'That is life'! Some become rich and vice versa. Socialism crumled decades before and capitalism has not perhaps delivered 100 per cent. But do we have an alternative?
It is ironical that China, India or Russia are opting more for the capitalistic model whereas The US of A is adopting a modicum of socialism. Or can we dream of a third alternative, which will be very realistic and not utopian to start with?
The flip side of rising crude prices and Fed funneling approx 700 bn dollars to sort of mitigate the impending finacial crisis has been that dollar has taken flight from emerging markets like India resulting in rupee's exchange rate has depreciated dramatically during this period whereas the sudden and colossal demand for the US greenback has seen it strengthen.
On the other hand, India's ivy-league B-schools are still going gung-ho on day zero placements. Last year, IIM-A had scapped GD as a part of the selection process for full time PGP(MBA) selection. This year it has come up with more electives. Premier B-Schools are not bothered much. Consultancy is one of the hot favourites with the top students of IIMs and more than 3-4th have opted to work in India. Can we still say that the world is flat? It can be depending on the stakes.