Financial Collapse Epidemics

Sometimes you can pick your neighbours, sometimes you can't. That's the reality of life. One of them, anyway.

When someone goes looking for real estate, it's true that they view the entire neighbourhood, try to get a feeling of the existing aura, but you look at the house as a prospective home buyer. Seldom do people go over and knock on the door of the house next door - on either side - to introduce themselves as potential neighbours trying to get a feeling of the others' characters.

In the case of establishing a geographical entity, a country, a national presence, there are continental neighbours. Just as people are individuals, and communities express a common purpose of established values, so too do countries exude a collective spirit, a shared communality of traditions, customs, values.

For the most part, nations that are geographically adjacent bear some resemblance to one another, and sometimes even share languages, some elements of culture, religious affiliations, ideologies, values.

Canada has the United States as its geographically-contiguous neighbour. We have some things in common, and others most certainly not completely. Americans are emphatic about themselves, Canadians more modest in that regard.

Social mores are similar but not completely; Canadians tend to be more relaxed about social issues. Like, for example, same-gender relationships, abortion rights, cannabis use. Religion exists at a set-back in the Canadian landscape, and is up front and very personal in the United States.

The U.S. is a veritable giant, with a population ten times that of Canada's, and an economy far larger. While the United States' GDP is capable of growing on its own production and internal consumption, leaving them far less reliant on trade to grow and prosper, it's the opposite with Canada which requires a robust trade in mostly commodities markets to enable the country to prosper.

That makes Canada extremely reliant on the health of the American economy, for the U.S. is Canada's largest trading partner. Canada is influenced by whatever happens in the United States and through the actions of the United States internationally as well as internally. It's inevitable. Despite which, Canada is different, its politics not quite echoing that of the U.S.

When the U.S. suffers we get these truly miserable aches and pains. So, watching the financial meltdown in the U.S. money markets isn't giving Canadians any comfort at all. We know we'll get socked by it, too, but hope it won't reflect the severity that most Americans will be hit with.

Small comfort, in a sense,that the rest of the world is reeling with the dismay of shattered economies, as the epidemic hits internationally in a globally interrelated financial system. Lack of attention of details, greed and corruption are endemic and become epidemic; we never learn.

This is such an inconvenient world at times, dammit.