Some things don’t change. Markets go up, markets go down — and people panic. There’s so much doom and gloom in the headlines (check that, just more doom and gloom than usual), that this particular post really got me. "Great Depression" and "Greater Depression" are phrases that have been bandied around a lot lately, but as Trent at The Simple Dollar points out, that’s pretty presumptuous:
Link: The Simple Dollar � The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself.
I look out my window here in Iowa and I see the ongoing harvest of one of the largest soybean and corn crops ever – not the cropless Dust Bowl of the 1930s.I don’t see a single person with a bank account that has lost their deposits, like my grandfather’s family did circa 1932. I see people going to work, working hard and producing value for their wage, coming home, and buying the things that they need to keep their family going, which puts money directly into the economy.I see unemployment barely over six percent, not the 25% rate at the time of FDR’s address.I see industrial production still rising – in 1932, it had fallen by more than half in just three years.
For me, this reinforces the things Jodie and I are doing at home right now. Gardening more, and saving more. As for investments, the only thing I’m doing is leaving them alone.
This too shall pass.
I’m not seeing anything worth a panic, either. It’s a correction, and a slowdown, and all of that, but I don’t see a collapse at all.
We’re also doing nothing. Waiting. Breathing. Enjoying what we have.
Tamara Sellman
Writer’s Rainbow:
“The creative writer’s guide to mucking through the apocalypse”
http://writersrainbow.blogspot.com/2008/10/creative-writers-guide-to-mucking.html