The Declaration of Independence could not have matched the applause that a 2008 State of the Union address or a campaign speech evokes! Is this a pointer to how the United States has evolved over the past two hundred years? Independent observation can be confusing because the lines between a healthy and a sick economy are so blurred! This article brainstorms on alternative financial planning options, using the distant past to chart course for an equally nebulous future. This piece follows from one we have published earlier entitled “Alternative Financial Planning to Revive a Flagging National Economy”.

It is not fashionable anymore to seek Aleutian counsel in the United States of today. Business management is hardly the stuff for cowboys to make heroes of Red Indians! However, the stark truth is that the Iroquois made classic contributions to the Constitution of the most successful nation ever. Can existing fragments of their thinking point us to a path in the jungle of strangulating recession? Financial planning at the individual level can certainly benefit, even if the caucuses and lobbies of Washington will have no longer have truck with the pillars of national economic construction.

A Collaborative Paradigm of Financial Planning

Competition is so ingrained in the psyche of free enterprise, that everyone is in a never-ending rat race of earmarking resources at the financial planning costs of others. Microsoft plans to match google by gobbling Yahoo, even as Chinese and Middle East stock investors hover over every American stock market. The US President seems as alone as Custer, as he has reaches out to spread democracy and freedom to an ungrateful world. We outsource so much of our business, but do the beneficiaries respond in our best interests? Negligence by emerging countries, compared to the British tradition of economic and other alliances with our financial planning, is especially disturbing.

We have a financial planning dilemma with respect to the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries. While China and Russia seem set on political courses entirely alien to our constitutional values, even Brazil and India have some socialist elements that could take them the Cuba-Venezuela way in the foreseeable future. The wise people of the Iroquois Confederacy were in a similar situation, when they opted to help their colonial vanquishers constitute a modern nation. Our financial planning salvation may lie in distinguishing between our allies in maintaining homeland security and bilateral trade ties for mutual benefit with the most favored economies of the future.

Financial Planning Bricks with the BRIC Block

A financial institution of the stature of JP Morgan will not appoint a former British Prime Minister to a key and expensive position without clear plans for returns. This kind of lateral thinking can pay dividends in both national as well as personal financial planning as well. All of us must learn to do business with our adversaries. We have spent the better part of two decades outsourcing and selling business to the Chinese, but since they have been less compliant than the Japanese in manipulating their currency in favor of ours, the Beijing links work against rather than for us!

Iroquois Confederacy Fundamentals for National Financial Planning (Part 2)