We've long been noting that recessions can actually prove a boon to innovation and to small businesses, as the opportunity cost of not working at a large corporation shrinks, as do the consequences of failure. Most recently, we pointed to iEntrepreneurship--a.k.a. designing iPhone apps--as a perfect example.
Whether you've been laid off by whatever tech company (or other sort of company) that you work for, or whether you've quit out of growing despondency at having to continue the daily rat-race grind even as your prospects for a raise or job growth, to say nothing of your stock options, have decreased, many people with ample talent and enterprise are finding themselves going into business for themselves. It's a great rearranging (or The Great Rearranging: if you can think of a better name for this phenomenon, which you probably can, tell us in the comments!).
Yesterday, the New York Times reported on perhaps The Great Rearranging's epicenter: Wall Street. (See picture: Gordon Gekko is telling you you should leave!) The financial industry's top dogs have seen their glamour factor plummet more steeply than the Dow, and with parallel remunerative loss. And so, says the Times, "Top bankers have been leaving Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and others in rising numbers to join banks that do not face tighter regulation, including foreign banks, or start-up companies eager to build themselves into tomorrow’s financial powerhouses." It's of course the latter that we care about.
So it's not hard to see how The Great Rearranging, even (especially) in the financial sector, is going to benefit the country as a whole: new financial businesses should be able to provide the type of innovation that lets the United States maintain its global financial and economic predominance while using the benefit of experience (and being hemmed in by tougher, smarter regulation) to avoid future catastrophe. And it's not hard to see how The Great Rearranging over all industries will produce similar results.
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