“President Barack Obama told Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to take all legal measures to block hefty bonuses awarded to employees of AIG”. As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Geithner was complicit in the initial $85 billion AIG bailout, which is the overwhelming experience that qualified his appointment as Treasury Secretary.

Geithner was touted as the only person who could fix the financial crisis, because only he knew the intimate details. Geithner didn’t stop the bonuses when he had the chance. Instead, he coordinated replacing AIG’s board of directors and top executives and accelerated the financial crisis.

Dick and Jane ask, “How much smaller would a financial crisis have to be to fix it or to let a bank, financial institution or auto maker fail?” “Who has had experience solving a financial problem this big?” “Is the inexperience that comes from allowing this financial crisis happen going to help fix it?”

Dick and Jane are curious if legislators, whose self-interest was central to creating this crisis, are capable of putting their constituents first. See the money, allegedly to fix it, being poured into the system with the same irreverence of the past that caused the problem.

Dick and Jane think we all should step back a moment and ask, “What size does a financial problem have to be for it to be solved rationally and logically?” “Divide up the big problem into smaller financial problems that can be solved rationally and logically.”

Remember Dick and Jane? They helped teach children to read using simple words and logical thinking. Approaching a solution with, “We just have to do something”, is not only illogical but also immature. Allowing those, with no experience in solving a problem this big, to try to solve this problem, is just simply, unconscionably wrong.

If we know that no one living today has ever solved such a big problem, why do we allow anyone to do something that could make the problem worse? That is a crime! It is like jumping off a cliff to evade a forest fire when we haven’t looked for shelter, a means to divert the fire’s path or some method of extinguishing individual flames of the fire. If we would not act so rashly under normal situations, why do we act so ignorantly under critical conditions?

Essentially, what we are now doing is trying to reinflate the financial bubble, the collapse of which has caused this financial crisis, with borrowed money, money we just do not have. Break up this big problem into smaller problems that can be worked on separately and concurrently. Trying to fix the problem before identifying what is wrong is like prescribing medicine before we find the extent of the illness or operating on a patient before we find the extent of the damage or growth.

Major pitfalls about which I caution high school and college students, when tutoring them in solving problems involving real-world math applications, can be avoided by reducing problems to their simplest forms before attempting solutions, repressing temptations to solve problems in a single step and documenting the calculations used so they can be revisited and reworked if necessary. As news reports bear witness, current solutions to our biggest financial crisis have fallen victim to these pitfalls.

ARTHUR S. GARDNER
Grand Junction

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