Three matters for discussion this week: sale of Air Jamaica, regulation of financial services and the apparent 'self-destruct' attitude of Wall Street and extreme ideologues in America.

On Air Jamaica - apparently the deadline has been set in stone - the national airline is to be sold by the end of March 2009.

I am reminded of the situation in which National Commercial Bank was among the assets of institutions acquired by FINSAC after the mid-1996 meltdown of the indigenous financial services sector.

Committed to return such assets to the private sector, vigorous attempts were made to find a buyer. Renowned HSBC - Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation was engaged to assist in the search.

During the period of their efforts a timeline was established in conjunction with the multilateral financial institutions.

This constraint was not only established but also clearly communicated in at least one of the publications of the institution.

Now any negotiator worth his or her salt knows you don't broadcast such facts of your condition. These things have an impact on price!

But this is what you get when you need assistance from the institutions that adhere almost with religious zeal to what used to be called the Washington Consensus - privatise, get government out of the way, let private enterprise prevail regardless of the specific conditions.

Well, the world is now upside down.

The thing about those who ideologically root for unregulated markets is that when things are fine they want government hands off but in trouble, the same government becomes nanny.

Hands off profits but embrace loss - by way of the taxpayer.

This is playing out right now in the global meltdown.

At least two cost-benefit studies demonstrated net positive impacts of Jamaica's airline on the economy and society. Generally the subsidy to Air Jamaica is described as such but who really benefits from it?

Sprit of Jamaica

Is it workers, Jamaican travellers, private tourism interests, the Jamaican national psyche, can the list be expanded, is it a composite of them all?

How does the 'sprit of Jamaica' respond to Reggae Boyz and Usain Bolt victories?

Is there value in this, do these things have nothing to do with raw economic numbers?

This is a big decision to take and it seems to me these questions should be answered in order to determine whether any beneficiaries of that subsidy can be encouraged to make a contribution.

Or could there be a different set of metrics created to assess the airline's performance once the areas of net benefit are established?

Alas, if reliance must be placed on external funding agencies in other areas of government operations such questions will definitely be deemed irrelevant. It seems though, that they are of some importance to national life.

Parliament is discussing the possibility of financial sector regulation and this is a most welcome development.

I have almost become tired of advocating the need for this. For I remember at the time of Wall Street's jettisoning of Glass Steagall, there were those who felt we in Jamaica were stupidly creating firewalls when the Mecca of finance and capitalism were finally seeing the light of deregulation or rather, as Greenspan put it 'self-regulation' which he now admits was wrong-headed.

Greed

We know where this has taken us now. We also know that greed and perhaps frustration and desperation make people gullible.

Were the regulations in place the so called alternative investment schemes we mushroomed could not exist and poor people, churches and the plain greedy would not have been able to exercise their right to trust those institutions more than they trusted government!

Finally, it is painful, unless through Jon Stewart's Daily Show comedy, to watch developments in Washington and on Wall Street. One has to wonder what kind of playwright is at work. The billions that Madoff scammed, further billions Merrill Lynch paid to entirely greedy and/or incompetent bankers and their apparent continuing hubris is mind boggling.

Their mea culpa in Congressional hearings do not absolve them nor does it return the multiple billions distributed as income and bonuses from profits that were merely apparent, wispy clouds, in the atmosphere of Merlin the magician-like derivatives of extreme toxicity.

Yet homeowners with under water mortgages and GM workers are blamed by some who insist true stimulus is really tax cuts. President Obama may yet rank a place on Discovery TV's popular documentary Dirty Jobs.

wilbe65@yahoo.com