Fareed Zakaria on capitalism

Yesterday I caught a good article on Capitalism by Fareed Zakaria . Mr Zakaria is a well known figure who is editor of Newsweek magazine and the host of talk show called GPS on CNN. Mr Zakaria is a known expert in the area of international relations, world politics, diplomacy and so on. When I saw his article on capitalism, my first reaction-what can he possibly say in such a complex area, it's not his field anyway. With that low expectation, I started reading the article ( six pages, requires a lot of patience) with an intention to dump it on first sign of a cliché, I had enough of them already.

After a rather dull beginning where he talked about the 40% or so rally in equity markets as a possible purveyor of economic turnaround, to my surprise he was off to the races. The story picked pace, what he was saying made perfect sense. There's no problem with the capitalism but the capitalists, nothing wrong with finance but financiers, the quarter by quarter mentality of corporate America means very less regard to long term thinking resulting in excessive risk and leverage, self restraint as in differentiating between what is legally allowed versus what is the right thing to do, greater reliance on a moral compass. He concludes the article with the following lines "We are in the midst of a vast crisis, and there is enough blame to go around and many fixes to make, from the international system to national governments to private firms. But at heart, there needs to be a deeper fix within all of us, a simple gut check. If it doesn't feel right, we shouldn't be doing it"

Deeper fix within all of us, seems simple but very hard to follow. All of us need to change ( for better), live within our means, follow our conscience- good old wisdom but seems lost in the current "instant gratification" based economy. Zakaria concludes the global interdependent, supply chain driven, gaint economy has become like a race car, so fast no one seems to be able to control it, the result..crash and burn..time for us to take a deep breath and take a step back..a step towards sanity. Good work Mr Zakaria, I am proud of you, I am proud to share the same country of origin as you, the great land of India!!