Today's silver lining

It was another slightly bad day on Wall St. today. Some people are calling today's 449 point drop the "second worst day of the year." But to me it is the second worst day of the week.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, professor at Columbia University and winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, offered some commonsense suggestions today for preventing another Wall St. crisis. I think he has a point.

However, if I may take a moment to reflect, it is at times like this that I think of the following words of The Yellow Emperor's Classic on Medicine:

treating a disease that has alredy developed . . . is like digging a well after you've become thirsty or making weapons after the battle is over.

So wrote Chinese scholars in the third millenium BCE.

This is true of so many things in life, but after all these thousands of years how many of us are wise enough to understand something this obvious? Or at least wise enough to ascertain which of our potential leaders might be wise enough to understand this and nominate financial regulators accordingly?