… because it’s all about money, right.
I grew up for the most part in the USA. Luckily, I was born as a dual citizen of the USA and Canada, and so ended up moving to Canada when it came time to go to university and make the (intermittent at the time) launch into adult life. The differences in certain things, like banking and mdical care and education, were apparent immediately and continue to differentiate the two countries, in my opinion.
At any rate .. we up here seem to be everybody’s darling at the moment, mainly because we did not go completely crazy with respect to millionaire-itis over the past decade or so.
Which feels funny just stating, because from my perspective I think that much of Canada (and predominantly in the big cities) during much of my adult life it has seemed as if we were aping the Americans, the only difference being that we were lagging a few years behind and were being a bit staid about it.
Being staid … aha. I understand we have a general reputation around the world as ‘being boring”, and of course ever so polite and friendly. I think that as generalities those attribues are accurate. I also think we Canadians have flashes of real brilliance in some fields, and an interesting pagmatic and matter-of-fact approach to many things.
And then there’s the multi-culturalism … I know it’s fashionable these days to state that multi-culturalism leads to isolation and fragmentation in societies, but I don’t see it so much here. Yes, the different major cultures / ethnic groups tend to live work and play together for the most part, but I also see an awful lot of mixing it up, and I certainly don’t feel nearly as much of the tension in the air between races as I imagine I feel when walking about in American cities.
Anyway … enough of the vapid generalizing for the moment. Here’s an excerpt from today’s NY Times about the relative solidity and stability of our banking and financial system. Evidently at the moment we are the envy of the world.
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The Great Solvent North
HAS the world turned upside down? America, the capital of capitalism, is pondering nationalizing a handful of banks. Meanwhile, Canada, whose banking system had long been notorious for its stodgy practices and government coddling, is now being celebrated for those very qualities.
The Canadian banking system, which proved resilient in the global economic crisis, is finally getting its day in the sun. A recent World Economic Forum report ranked it the soundest in the world, mostly as the result of its conservative practices. (The United States ranked 40th).
President Obama has joined the adoring throng. He recently said that Canada has “shown itself to be a pretty good manager of the financial system in the economy in ways that we haven’t always been here in the United States.” Paul Volcker, former chief of the United States Federal Reserve, commented that what he’s arguing for “looks more like the Canadian system than the American system.”
Most people don’t know that the vision behind Canada’s banking system, made up of a few large, national banks with branches from coast to coast, actually had its beginnings in the United States. Canada’s system is the product of a banking framework inspired by Alexander Hamilton, the first American secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton envisioned the First Bank of the United States, chartered in 1791, as a central bank modeled on the Bank of England.
Canadians found inspiration in Hamilton’s model, but not all Americans did …
[Snip … }
Since Mr. Obama seems to admire the Canadian banking system, his administration might want to take a page out of its playbook.
This would entail building a national banking system based on a small number of large, broadly held, centrally and rigorously regulated firms. Imitating the Canadian model would require sweeping consolidation of American banks. This would be a very good thing. Washington had difficulty figuring out the magnitude of the financial crisis because there are so many thousands of banks that it was impossible for regulators to get into all of them.
[ Snip … ]
There is no time to waste. Reconfiguring the American banking structure to look more like the Canadian model would help restore much-needed confidence in a beleaguered financial system.
Why not emulate the best in the world, which happens to be right next door? At the very least, Hamilton would have approved.
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Read the rest here …
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