But now co-operative sector is falling short to meet challenges of modern times (globalization is one key factor), the co-operative politics has gone morally bankrupt, and farmers have no leaders. Sharad Pawar shifted quickly from sugarcane (food) to cricket (media), but farmers are hardly able to change their ‘profiles’. The rural youth also plays cricket (reflecting his aspiration to become urban) but no one will ever get equity in BCCI.

The financial institutions need to be entrenched in process of change while working with any part of our market, especially the backward ones. The developmental solution may be anything- ranging from urbanization to reviving the agriculture to employment guarantee scheme, we need to have more bankers understanding the basics of change economics and create the products-services for catalyzing the socio-economic change. They need to design products-services not just for transactions – investment is perhaps the most important. Community development was inherent in co-op banking but only way for modern banks (ICICIs, HDFCs) to have effective societal penetration is to walk on the shoulders of cutting edge innovative social movements – both technological and organizational innovations on forefront.

Since everyone values money, financial sector has huge role and responsibility in creating what we can call as reform enterprises. We, unfortunately, have history of ‘them’ waiting forever. No ventures and no angels. They will talk about microfinance, but refuse the responsibility of acting on several levels between micro and macro or moving along several angles between horizontal and vertical processes of development. They only change when changing societal values (or ‘change in value perception’ as business describes it) bring the total catastrophe on wall streets. People in our markets need financial institutions for change resulting into market expansion and benefiting everyone.

The tendency to splurge whenever one has some liquidity is in human nature. However in rural India such expenses especially for weddings of daughers or family events is also driven by social beliefs and needs. Even today it is not easy to marry off a not so educated and financially dependent girl without spending good amount of money in the marriage. So between repayment of loan and the expenses for family functions or marriages they have to choose the later as they have no other choice.

And once modern economies ditched the gold standard (where quantities of the stuff were limited due to its physical nature), the value of anything has become subject to easy swings w.r.t. mass belief in the same (tech companies, houses, oil, whatever). Physical gold cannot disappear overnight, but “value” of modern currencies, stocks, etc can. Since a) it is virtual and b) only exists in the collective consciousness of modern societies.

And once money stopped being tied to a physical substance, governments could much easily just “print” it, or basically create it out of thin air. Which is what Obama and all governments are promising now. Of course, the “value” of the newly printed dollars will be less, or in other words, inflation goes up.

Coming back to bubbles, since a) modern markets are electronic and b) money is not linked to a physical substance, bubbles are pretty much a given. Wall street, with all its brains, thrived on them. Just move the virtual money from one bubble to another and keep going. Tech bubble, real estate bubble and shortest of them all - the commodities bubble. And all these bubbles were never a function of livelihood linked demand and supply. They were speculation linked demand and supply.

But, finally, it looks like reality is catching up. But, I would still not put it past Wall Street to cook up something new.