Is US turning out to be a single point of failure?

With the US economy having developed cold (my version for recession), everyone else seems to be catching
pneumonia.

For all the talk about broad based economies and the prudence of spreading risks. This is a classic case of
not believing in your own medicine. Any well-designed system will attempt to
prevent single points of failure. Talk to an IT guy and he will vouch for this,
i.e. the US economy getting to be a single point of failure in the global
economic system?

I am sure the Americans would like to take up this challenge and see how they can induce robustness into the
world economy. After all they keep doing this kind of stuff all the time.
Don’t they? Sending rockets into outer space is not a joke. Plus all those
space shutter that keep making successful trips, putting things (satellites
mostly) into orbit and coming back. (We would not talk here of the vehicles
which have been sent to explore Mars and Venus. Anything on a one way journey is
not worth talking about.)

All they need to do is to apply the same principles to the global economic system and ensure that the whole
system does not collapse because of perturbations in any one part of the system.

Right now, things could not be worse. Someone feels low at NASDAQ and you have BSE Sensex crashing. In fact
things are getting worse. Even CSE has started making it to the news these days.
(Looking at it positively, that is a miracle. Poor CSE had almost but ceased to
exist in peoples’ mind. But the crash there has made it bounce back into view
with a vengeance. Some solace that. Hopefully, we will soon hear similar news
about Ahmedabad stock exchange!).

Come to think of it, this whole economic system is behaving like the human body. We started liberalization (sic)
as an antidote or medicine to cure our economy of its maladies. While the
medicine seems to be working and the economy, we are told, is gradually getting
into shape, we seem to be getting plagued by some side effects of this
medicine-just like the human body. (Cure for cancer and lose hair types!)

Obviously, this treatment is not the best medical attention the economy could have been given. We want treatment
that cures the ills and does not have side effects. Do I hear some Homeopath
trying to raise his hand? Well sir, I guess the Allopathic have not given up
hope yet. If medicine does not work, they will try surgery and maybe throw out
the affected parts if possible. Or may be try a transplant!

In fact, having said that, it
seems they are trying to probably do transplantation in most cases. At least
during the cold war days, you could seek a second opinion from Russia too. Now
you have only doctor for this malady–the US. So you either accept his line of
treatment or die a slow death without medication. Do you get what
transplantation means in this context? (I hope I am not giving the swadeshi’s
food for thought. They are another lot who will go to another extreme). Anyway,
for the time being, this transplantation stuff seems to be working fine with one
country after another getting ‘thought transplantation’ the Americans may.
(By the way, transplantation is an extremely profitable business!)

But hey! Who is thinking about
the single point of failure in the system? The US must do something about it.
(See. That is the problem with us Indians–always looking at someone else to
come with the solution. But let me not be too harsh. After all Ayurveda has not
quite made it yet. And the way the Americans are patenting our herbs and other
stuff of Indian origin, even the Ayurvedic solutions may some day come from
America--just like our textiles which comeback with foreign labels and inflated
price tags!)

I hope no one picks on me for
picking on US like this. After all, I it is their medicine, and hence, I guess,
there moral responsibility to ensure that the global economy is robust. In fact
I am sure they would not let me down on this one. After all, they are hardly
ever shied away from their other moral responsibilities in the past. Look at
Israel, Vietnam, and Iraq… So why will they not shoulder this responsibility?

There is only one catch. In this
particular case, US itself is coming out as the single point of failure. The
entire global economy seems to be perilously linked to and dependent on how the
US economy does. And this to my mind is absolutely bad design. (I am sure my
techy friends who design networks will agree 100 percent with me on this). There
is absolutely no redundancy in this design.

Drawning an analogy again from
my techy friends, you can improve the performance of a network only to an extent
if it is badly designed or has outlived itself. After a stage you need to
redesign it.

As architects of the modern
economy, US needs to seriously look at the design of the global economic system
and build one (since they got into it) based on sound benchmark criteria. The
problem is, doctors are not known to be good treating themselves. And
unfortunately this single point of failure in the economy right now is the US
itself! God be with us.