Wake up and smell the roses
April 6, 2008As one of my friends would say, if it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s a duck. So while the US may not want to use the “R” word, one of the world’s largest investment banks falling to its knees begging for mercy has to count as a clue.
The sad thing is, people seem to be caught up on semantics. Investors in Bear Stearns, people visiting Hawaii or any of the 80,000 people that lost their jobs in March alone (the highest monthly fall in the US for 5 years) must surely be amazed that there are still question marks over whether the US is in a recession.
I wouldn’t like to even start to consider the number of hours that Fox, CNN and others have spent debating this point, or for that matter, what it will take for it to be finally recognized for what it is. A recession isn’t the end of the world and may actually shake the US out of its daydream, but for that to happen, the focus has to shift from labeling the problems to solving them.
It is funny to see just how how closely related the economy of the UK is to that of the US. Whether or not you want to call it a recession (some define it as 2 months of negative growth) is up to you, but whatever you name it, it is sure to be painful over the coming months.
Of course the past 10 years of growth was unsustainable and had to come to an end at some point. What goes up must come down, right! The fact that this excess was fueled by borrowed money always meant that it was living on borrowed time.
The US is a great country but it is not helped by it’s insulated view of itself, reflected like a mirror through the media and film industries; continually perpetually the myth of the American dream.
The US has exported some great ideas to the rest of the world, but i fear that the UK has been too quick to adopt some of them. The worst thing is the discrepancy between the rich and the poor. This is a hugh stain on the US and now on the UK as well.
We over here would have been better off selecting some of the methods used in countries such as Sweden, Denmark and Holland where they have the majority of the population lives somewhere in the middle.
None of us wants to be poor and it is certainly not necessary to be rich, maybe one day we can overcome these extremes.
Think it’s a little harsh to point the finger solely at the US and UK as the growing gap between the rich and poor is more of a global issue. The beeb looked at the world’s population and concluded that the income of the richest 1% of people is the same as that of the poorest 60%.
The recent Forbes’ rich list also tells its own story. Four Indians, one Mexican, one Russia and only two US citizens in the top ten. If you you consider the size of those economies relative to the US it makes interesting reading.