OPEN-Houston Brought A Most Useful Seminar For The Community

The Organization of Pakistani Entrepreneurs and Professionals (OPEN) is a not-for-profit organization and started in 1998 from Boston Massachusetts, with sole purpose to promotion entrepreneurship and professional growth of Pakistanis, in collaboration with those living around Pakistanis. OPEN has several chapters across USA. One of the main aims of OPEN is to enhance the prosperity of Pakistani businesspersons, which in turn should reflect in the augmentation of wealth and resourcefulness of the Pakistani community living in USA and for the societies at large Pakistanis live. In order to achieve its goals and objectives, OPEN organizes several educational seminars and networking events, as well as fosters sound relationship with political & business decision makers in USA and Pakistan. OPEN also has special focus on the youth, encourage them to be innovating entrepreneurs and proficient professionals and bring for them various internship programs themselves or through other organizations’, business and governmental entities.

At the picturesque Embassy Suites Hotel along Katy Freeway at South Kirkwood, OPEN-Houston organized a timely seminar on “The Credit Crisis and Great Recession: A Historical Perspective”, presented by Faisal David Khan, Senior Financial Advisor and Partner with Ameriprise Advisory Services. He talked about the governmental intervention, the worsened housing market, securitization, investment banking, and the current volatile financial climate. After his short power-point presentation, he answered several questions of the attendees for more than half-an-hour.

“I am against governmental control of free enterprise system of USA: However we do need proper regulations and check-&-balances, so that everyone plays by rules and greed does not become the main ingredient of the system,” said Faisal David Khan.

He said although President Obama Governments’ steps to strongly intervene into the markets have avoided the depression, but have we really come out of the troubled waters, no one can say for certainty. Reason is when there was incentive to buy homes, people bought the homes. Moment it was going away, we had the worst home sales month. Similarly clunker car program increased auto sales, but once gone, it also went down.

Faisal David Khan most eloquently explained that the concept of “Leverage” is one of the main reasons for the markets downfall. Leverage is when: (a) an institution’s financial assets are larger than its capital; (b) an institution is exposed to the change in value of a position more than the amount that it paid for the position; or (c) an institution owns a position with embedded leverage. A position with embedded leverage is a position with an exposure larger than the underlying market factor.

Result of this concept of “Leverage” is that we have seen watershed event of the Bear Stearns Companies, Inc Company of 1923, collapsing completely in 2008, due to the subprime mortgage crisis.

Businesses and individual consumers have learned the lesson and are willing to be regulated. President Obama Government needs to bring more innovative and stricter regulations and try to avoid complete takeover of the government, as that will hurt the free venture system.

“We should be worried about USA Economy, more so that the world economy is dependent on USA. Although we may see countries like China making amazing strides in the financial field, but in fact their economy is dependent largely on the well-being of US,” added Faisal David Khan.

For more information on OPEN-Houston and/or getting involved in a business endeavor, one can visit http://www.open-houston.org/

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