America always works.

You can hear it in her poetry:
From Walt Whitman:
“I hear America singing.
The carpenter singing, the mason singing, the boatman singing,
The delicious singing of the mothers
Their strong melodious songs”.
From Langston Hughes:
“I too, sing America,
I am the darker brother,
I laugh and grow stronger,
I too, am America”.
From Marge Piercy:
“The people I love the best jump into work head first,
I want to be with people who submerge in the task,
Who do what has to be done.”
In a limerick:
“There once was a baker named Fred,
Who checked out his checkbook and said,.
My funds are so low
Guess I’ll knead some more dough
That’s the best way I know to make bread”.
As the curtain rises on “The Glass Menagerie”, Tennessee Williams’s narrator says “It was that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind and were having their fingers forced down in the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.” Even then, girls could still earn ten cents a dance and sing “Ain’t we got fun”.
The billionaire George Soros lost some serious money in the Crash of 2008 but said without bitterness, “I was betrayed by my dreams”. He has moved on, which is what I would advise everyone to do now. This week I read about Patricia Kluge who seems to have blown $100,000,000. She too, was betrayed by her dreams. As for Bernie Madoff and his rich clients, the word schadenfreude comes to mind. When I worked in Zurich we said “Das ist schade” when someone had a cold or a headache. Losing millions requires more advanced German.
All pain is instruction and so America is back in school and will emerge smarter about money, the market and mortgages.
I was fired once upon a time in a very cold room in Toronto by a guy wearing a cheap suit. Did the world end? It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I moved on and in three years I was in the best job of my life, living in London in a 5000 sq.ft. flat overlooking Regents Park. I could even approve my own expense account.
Things will work out for America. They always have. Stephen Sondheim penned a great song in “Follies” about the ups and downs of a showgirl. It goes something like this:
“Good times and bad times come and go and I’m still here…went through the Depression, met a big financier…and I’m here”.