The global finance crisis is much about perspective. Personally, I’ve never invested much money, and couldn’t really imagine what it means for the USA to offer 700 billion dollars in their Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. Honestly spoken, I don’t believe anybody can imagine a sum so large… unless you divide it, say, by the number of people in this world. Roughly 100$ per human being. Compare this to another number, then: 55% of all people in the world earn less than this in a month.1) Surprising, isn’t it?
It’s sad that you get even worse numbers when you do the calculation for Switzerland. We’re currently supporting UBS with roughly 70 billion Swiss Francs. I wonder why we only asked for 3 billions (or 0.7% BNI) for development cooperation last summer…
1) Milanovic, Branko: True world income distribution. World Bank Development Research Group, November 2000, page 30.