The unbearable lightness of today’s society

Milan Kunderas published a novel titled “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” in 1984, which refers to the lightness of decisions, that life is never reviewed, lived without rehearsal. This is the irresponsible nature of colors, according to Kunderas. This irresponsibility seems to be getting worse in our time, from individual life, which is the subject of the novel, to the management of more and more show business characters, governments and corporations that do nothing in the series, but in the hands of experts. plus.

There is a movie on NETFLIX called Inventing Anna. This movie tells the true story of a young European girl with little financial resources who immigrates to New York and manages to pretend to be the heir to a large fortune and gets big loans from supposedly respected people. Banks without financial backing or knowledge are based on lies.

Hard to believe because of the light-heartedness that financiers take regardless of what the adventurer tells, this story pales in comparison to the story of Elizabeth Holmes, who claims to have invented a method for all-purpose blood testing. a skewer. Everyone believed him, and to develop and use the invention, he founded a company called Theranos and gave it a heavyweight board that included Henry Kissinger and George Schultz (former secretary of state), William Perry (former secretary of defense), Jim. Mattis (retired four-star general in the Navy) and Richard Kovachevich (former CEO of Wells Fargo). These characters were expected to check the existence of the invention before naming the company in order to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in capital. In reality, they gave you a chance to rob them. Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to eleven years in prison for fraud.

The lawsuits brought by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are even more striking in terms of the scale of the scams and the extent of the lies people swallow to get scammed. For example, the famous platform Binance cannot operate in New York because it does not have the necessary reserves and hides the truth. Many other companies in the industry operate in the shadows without compliance or regulation. But there was one among them who was the pride of the industry, who spent enormous sums to build an image of integrity and efficiency, and publicly advocated regulation to protect customers. This was the FTX platform, second only to Binance in size.

The trustee, John Ray III, appointed by a court to settle his bankruptcy, which occurred a few weeks ago, stated in his first report upon arrival at the company’s premises:
“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete loss of reliable financial information as here. so far, this situation is unprecedented.”

There is one common factor in all these cases: Scammers target people who don’t want to be left out of their so-called money making opportunity without understanding how to do it. As in the cases of GRAMCO, Allen Stanford, and Bernie Madoff, this has always been the case. But there is something in the current cases that other scams don’t. Unlike these cases, the incredible thing is that large professional investment firms (such as BlackRock, Tiger Global, Insight Partners and the like) are among the investors who lost their money; He repeatedly checked not only the questionable nature of the work, but also essential things that the auditor found very lacking.

All these cases (and many others like them) are not just criminal but manifestations of mild, irresponsible behavior, as if millions of dollars did not represent the greatness they represent, as if decisions about them were made without minimal precautions. necessary measures to handle them.

In El Salvador, the government still doesn’t know how to pay off hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds that are due in a few weeks. He seems to be waiting for a miracle. It is as if many people have lost the measure and discipline necessary to run companies and governments. It is the tone of our age.

MA in Economics
northwest university