The Skeptical Optimist

Sometimes it’s hard to fathom how deep this hole of a financial crisis goes. For me, I’ve been reading about doom and gloom for weeks now and through the bulletins know about bailout plans, capital injection and what this means for the markets… Still when somebody comes up with a figure like 700 billion US dollars or a phrase like “trillions have been lost over the past few days” - it’s just really hard to get your head around these figures.

Of course, economists and experts say that because we’ve just had some boom times, what’s happening to the market is taking a while to trickle down the ordinary folk. But trickle down it will, in fact, some are likening what’s to come to a tsunami. We’re already seeing the foreclosures in the States and back here at home the sad plight of retirees who lost their life savings unwittingly investing in Lehman Brothers.

Where I’m feeling it the most is in my portfolio which has gone down by over 30 percent on paper. I’m just holding my breath and waiting it out… But I can’t help remembering that it’s a real privilege that I can do so, that I had set this money aside for investment purposes and have other savings that I can tap on for emergencies. Frankly, I can’t begin to understand what it must be like for those retiring or about to retire, seeing their nest egg wiped out like that.

I’m no expert on economics, but sometimes I wonder whether one of the reasons why we’re in this situation today is the greater cultural shift to a greed based, instant gratification society. A few years ago, my mother, who is now a retired junior college teacher pointed out a difference in the students she had taught over the decades; when she asked them what they wanted the most from their jobs previously, they said the most important thing would be to help others, as she neared retirement, most of them had one word for her: money. I encountered this impulse myself when I was nearing graduation in the States, a lot of my peers were going to luxe interviews for investment banks on Wall Street and talk on the senior campus was thick with whether JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs paid better.

Now, I’m not saying that I’m immune to all this talk. Who doesn’t want a bigger more comfortable apartment or a nicer car? I don’t have a maid, but that’s mainly because I can’t afford to hire one and rent a room for her away from my apartment so that she has more space for herself. I ration out high end meals and cut back on clothes and makeup for myself… Still, I wonder how did we get here? How did we become a society so focused on where to make a quick buck through investing in risky securities? Where do we get off taking on jobs not for passion or for the difference they make in people’s lives, but for the money?

Tags: financial crisis, greed, investment banking, jobs, uncertainty

This is my younger son, Dante - aged almost 17 months. I think the gene pool acquitted itself quite well here….:) He has just started talking and one of his favourite and complete phrases is “I want milk!” - this is usually preceded by pulling you to the kitchen and pointing vigorously at the fridge. I nursed him until he was about 10 months old and then weaned him gradually off to formula (I found that goat’s milk went down best) and then to full cream cow’s milk.

I have to admit that I’m one of those compulsive parents who read ingredient labels like a fiend and try as far as possible to feed my children balanced, natural and where affordable, organic diets. It’s not easy, but we try our best. So I can completely imagine the anguish of those parents in China and their anger at the unscrupulous (can I use the word evil?) companies who used an industrial grade toxin to boost protein levels in diluted milk. Frankly, it’s really incredible that this could happen in the first place. For one, the people responsible for doing this must have some basic grasp of science, so by default they would know the consequences of their actions. It boggles the mind.

But it also highlights a greater problem in our increasingly globalised and complex food supply chain. It’s already fairly challenging to screen out suspect products and produce from countries like China but what of raw materials in processed food? There is just no way to make sure that chocolate bar that’s made in Australia didn’t get its milk from China. In my household, I’d stopped buying vegetables and fruit from China for a few years now, but even then, I can’t escape the fact that everytime I eat out in my favourite coffeeshop or hawker centre, that stewed cabbage I love or the kailan stirfry that I dutifully order are probably, inevitably from China.

Of course, most Singaporeans say that they trust the AVA here and that proper checks are in place. I don’t doubt that the regulatory agency is doing its job, and I’ve personally met some of the people there and I know they are very serious about what they do. But the truth is, tests are not foolproof for the simple fact that there are some things that most agencies would never think of testing for. In this latest case of melamine tainted foodstuff - the regulatory agency in China admitted that the idea of finding melamine in milk was so unlikely that they just didn’t test for it as a contaminant. That’s like trying to test flour for cement - you wouldn’t think it was there in the first place…

Most of all though, I worry for my children - their little bodies harbour greater concentrations of toxins and their organs are less able to cope with filtering out the bad stuff. What do you do as a mother, when they lookat you with trusting innocence and happily slurp up whatever is put in front of them on the table? As I wrote before, I try to buy organic most of the time and I avoid most processed foods - but this whole scandal has really left me with a bad taste in the mouth. How much trust should we give food labeling? When is 100% fresh cow’s milk not 100%?

Tags: china food scandal, food safety