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There’s this notion going around that tough times will reveal the true character of America. It’s a good bit of marketing and satisfies our desire for myth. But it’s baloney.
When you’re backed up against a wall, you learn one thing: people have a keen sense of survival and a knack for self-preservation. It’s those other times that show us what we’re made of, like those times everyone thought they could get rich buying and selling tech stocks houses oil futures hope?
I guess Bush will take the blame from a lot of people. But whatever else he did, he didn’t force anyone to take on a mortgage they couldn’t afford.
But didn’t he and his cronies create the climate that made all those criminal excesses possible? I suppose they might bear some responsibility, but people have to take their share of the blame occassionally.
We get the leaders that serve up what we want to believe, and we very badly wanted to believe in everlasting wealth.
It doesn’t mean we still can’t become Treasury Secretary some day, even if it means a come-down in pay.
If Circuit City can’t make it, what hope is there for the rest of us? Well, at least I might get a good deal on a wireless mouse and a new wristpad for my keyboard. The old one is coming unglued (as you can see below, it looks like a blue mystery-meat hoagie).
What’s good for the consumer these days might not be so good tomorrow. I keep hearing about how bad this economy is (the worst since the Great Depression?) , and it’s a cliche that a recession is when a neighbor is out of work and you have to write about it, a depression is when you are out of work. But I can’t quite wrap my head around it.
Maybe it’s because I work from home and have no one to talk to to stoke my fears. Or maybe it’s because people in general err to the positive or the negative, and the muddlesome truth is impossible to tease out.
All I know is a lot of people are losing their jobs with little prospect of getting a new one. I doubt their bank accounts will carry them through whatever’s coming. They can sell off assets, but the more people go that route, the less they’ll earn. More supply, lower prices. At least newspapers might see a small uptick in classified sales. Good luck collecting payment.
Someone should study winning bids on ebay to see if the average is up, down or unchanged. Yes, it’s a lot of apples to oranges, but still. There must be some method that could cut through the madness. Reading this makes me wonder what other statistical nuggets ebay might be able to cough up, if pressed.
Thus, the question. Do I buy a new wristpad or wrap duct tape around what I have? Or should I spare the duct tape to repair a more valuable asset down the road before posting it on ebay?
So I’ve been reading a lot lately about the pain of independent gas stations and how they’re struggling with falling fuel prices. It seems they haven’t been buying gas often enough to mark down their prices as quickly as their chain competitors.
Funny, but I don’t recall independent gas stations raising their prices more slowly than their chain counterparts. In fact, I remember them following rising prices lockstep.
Seems to me, if independents were buying gas as often then as they are now (i.e,, not as often as their bigger rivals) they would have been stuck with lower-priced gas. Thus, they could have raised their prices more slowly and undercut the competition, albeit at the expense of higher profits.
If you recall that happening, let me know. I could be wrong, as most mom-and-pop gas stations in York County, PA are gone — I can think of only two).
It’s easy to work up sympathy, but the effort shouldn’t cloud logic. If they were smart, independent-station owners have some extra cash left over from the days of skyrocketing prices (credit-card fees notwithstanding).
Or, like Wall Street titans, they thought “up” was the only direction prices could go.
You’ll be fine. That’s the soothing advice a parent gives a 4-year-old who bangs his head on a coffee table. I would expect a little more from the leader of the free world, but that seems to be the basic White House message on the economy.
It’s technically correct that we “got through” the Depression. But it wasn’t because Americans elected FDR to be cheerleader-in-chief. It’s because FDR threw hundreds of ideas at the problem. Right, and then we fought a big war.
The bailout clearly isn’t going to be the end-all and be-all of too many economic crises on this planet. Nor is another interest-rate cut going to do the job. Haven’t we already had several hundred of those in the last decade?
If the crisis is truly one of confidence, then no technocratic solution will work. And nor will jawboning about giving those technocratic solutions more time to take effect. It’s ironic that a president who prides himself on taking action is now reduced to words in support of other people’s actions.
It’s stressful, no? Maybe we all could use a retreat to a nice spa, not just the frazzled execs at AIG.
So maybe it’s doom after all for the US economy. At any rate, I was mentally tossing around various causal factors for the mess and I settled on one possible psychological motivation — and it has something to do with Sept. 11, 2001.
It’s probably no accident that financial excess followed the tragedy of 9/11. Imagine traders walking past the visible scar of that day and wondering why some died, some survived. They drowned themselves in a sea of speculative trading. They took risks that make sense only if you’re heedless of the consequences.
It’s the reaction you might have if your best friend died in some senseless, horrible accident that might have claimed you as well. But you went on living anyway. And drank — or gambled or sky-dived or high-speed raced — yourself into oblivion. Either looking for a reason why you survived — or, more aptly, trying to avoid looking. Financial types, known more for speculation than introspection, probably opted for the latter.
What’s also interesting is the flight to Greenwich you (or at least I) read about lately. That is, all the money now is being made by hedge funds in Greenwich. It’s the high-finance version of cocooning with the family in the suburbs.
I may be wrong, or not wholly right. But it makes just as much sense as ascribing it all to greed, pure and simple. Greed has been around for eons, yet it doesn’t cause financial panics every day. And it may not be the thing that drove every last soul on Wall Street. Greed is just the easiest and least controversial straw to grasp.
We used to have an economy based on making stuff. Now we have an economy based on making bets. Alas, we haven’t figured out what to do when those bets blow up in our faces.
America’s safety net is based on factory employment, not financial speculation. The theory, I suppose, is that people engaged in financial speculation do so with an eyes-wide-open appreciation for the risks. The theory appears to need some revision.
It’s too bad the healthcare system isn’t given to the same booms and busts as our financial system. Then people might actually be talking a bit more about real reform.
Indeed, if I were paranoid, I would say the credit crisis is just a way to divert attention from more serious, long-term issues. After all, banks make money by making loans. They’ll start doing it again someday. And, as I’m sure every mortgage broker never tires of shouting (even today): Interest rates are low by historical standards! Now’s the time to buy!
But alas, people tend to get sick on a fairly regular basis no matter the state of the underlying economy, so business for doctors, hospitals, etc is pretty steady. Kind of like the forward progress the Titanic was making after it bumped into the iceberg. Too big to sink?
