Mutual Distrust: Very Good for the Global Economy?

From marital infidelity being the bread and butter of the private investigation industry to the Eurofighter selling like hotcakes at the recent 2009 Dubai Air Show, is mutual distrust very good for the global economy?

By: Ringo Bones


Pioneering game theorist John Von Neumann was smart enough to foresee that an all-out nuclear exchange between the US and the then Soviet Union would certainly wipe out the global economy as we know it. But did he also foresee that low-level mutual distrust – i.e. the so-called “Cold War” – eventually paid very good financial dividends? Maybe the movie Wall Street only got it half right, greed may be good, but mutual distrust is better - especially when it comes to money making.

Overall, the commercial civilian aviation side of the aerospace industry may be down thanks to the global credit crisis and might take another 6 months to fully recover. Not so with the defense side of the aerospace industry when the Eurofighter Typhoon is currently selling like hotcakes at the 2009 Dubai Air Show’s first two days. By the way, the 2009 Dubai Air Show was scheduled for November 15 to 19. With Saudi Arabia as the main customer of this “value-for-money” air defense weapons system, it does seem like the world’s crude oil industry is here to stay for yet another century.

On a more “grassroots level”, the private investigation industry is one of the few businesses that managed to buck the trend of the past few months’ worldwide recession. Corporate espionage may constitute the few “prestige cases” of a fortunate few private investigation agencies, but their main bread-and-butter is still the marital infidelity investigation and verification biz. To most of us working folks, paying our hard-earned money to hire a private investigator to make sure of our significant other’s marital fidelity is probably the closest thing we’ll ever manage of buying our very own squadrons of high-performance fighter jets. As part of the Reagan Doctrine, “trust but verify” is still the cornerstone of our post Cold War capitalist society.