A few weeks ago we published allegations that Lee Williams, a British real estate developer, had disappeared, leaving millions of kroons in debt. The same story was reported in the rest of the Estonian news media.
Lee Williams has spoken exclusive to The Baltic Times and it appears that we and the rest of the Estonian media may have jumped the gun in making unproven accusations against him. We would like to apologize to Williams for any pain we may have caused him and his family.
It seems that Williams may have been a victim as much as a culprit of greed and profligacy not by solely himself but by all of us.
Lee started a company call Churchill OU three years ago at the height of the property boom.
At the time, people believed that we had entered a new economic paradigm. It was called the goldilocks economy.
Now we know it was just another fairytale.
Each month brings fresh bad news on how the property prices in Estonia, Latvia and, to a lesser extent Lithuania, are tumbling.
And because of the way that banks have parceled up debt and sold them to each other, what started as a crisis in the real estate sector in the United States and elsewhere has spread like a contagion to every part of the financial system.
One financier tells a story of how he came to Estonia two years ago and overheard two young Irish entrepreneurs talking about how much money they were going to make investing on the Estonian real estate market. It turned out the two 'entrepreneurs' were a hair dresser and a mechanic.
The investor said that if a hairdresser and a mechanic were bragging about their real estate investments then it's time to get out of the market
The story has a curious echo of the investment banker who in 1929, just before the Wall Street crash, decided to pull out of the New York Stock Exchange because his shoe shine boy was talking about stocks.
Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan is calling recent events a once-in-a-century occurrence. Some economists blame him individually for the current situation for printing money and allow cheap credit for 25 years.
Some people blame bankers for being irresponsible and handing out credit willy nilly.
However, everyone who borrowed money to buy a flat screen TV, or exaggerated their income to purchase a new house, or took out an SMS loan to go to the casino is to blame.
This could mean that a lot of us could wind up jobless, penniless and homeless. This is bad. The worse calamity to hit the 20th century was not the two world wars or the Russian revolution or Hiroshima, it was the Great Depression. It was the Great Depression that more than the any other event defined the modern world.
The Depression allowed the Nazis to come to power in Germany and led to the collapse of democracy across Europe by 1940. The Great Depression shaped America. Before it, the United States was a looser confederation of states. The federal agencies the Roosevelt set up as part of the New Deal centralized that nation.
But it is the scale of human misery that the Great Depression is remembered for.
Now it may be happening all over again. Let's hope that the brilliant minds that run the world economy can find a way to fix it, and let's try not to dish out blame- not to Greenspan, not to the bankers and especially not Lee Williams.
