This photo of a US detective gingerly advancing through the wreckage of somebody’s home with his pistol loaded and ready to fire may look like something out of a war. But it’s just an ordinary scene from the suburbs in post-crash America.
The photo, taken in March 2008 by Time magazine photographer Anthony Suau, was voted the World Press Photo of 2008 and was recently on show in the Holyrood parliament. Detective Robert Kole was photographed in a repossessed home in Cleveland, Ohio to ensure evicted residents had left.
For more in this vein you really should watch Times of Crisis: The Year of Global Change, an epic, awesome 11-minute 42 second ‘documentary’ from Thomson Reuters and Media Storm. Parts are simply breath-taking, parts are harrowing, and it encapsulates the global nature of the crisis in the year since Lehman’s collapse better than anything else I’ve seen.
The Thomson Reuters / Media Storm video reminds us that the recklessness, greed and immorality of a few brain-dead bankers and borrowers in the US and UK has not just effected their own career prospects, the sustainability of the institutions where they once worked, and indeed the future of financial services and the global economy. It has also unleashed global chaos, bringing appalling suffering in the poorer communities of the developed world and right across the emerging economies.
As the banking economist Robert McDowell, who alerted me to this video, said: “it is a great example of good solid neutral journalism”
I am thinking of using it to kick off my first lecture to post-graduate students at the University of Stirling, where next month I begin my associate lectureship in financial journalism as as part of the university’s new MSc.
Watch Times of Crisis: The Year of Global Change, September 2008 – September 2009
This blog post was published on 16 September 2009