By Ribeco.org | March 13, 2010 at 07:46 AM EST | 1 comment
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"Crisis" - The dark power of prophecy.
On the positive side... by: Rick Beets, Chairman & Managing Consultant
31 March 2009.
Crisis,
crisis..., recession, Depression. They're just words, of course,
but they tend to be self-evident in our daily surroundings, even if
neither of them must apply. When something that lasts longer than
several days it can no longer be credibly called a "crisis", so perhaps
the economic climate of the past year has more to do with what it's called than with what transpired or what might still await. The first to speak doom have a lot to answer for...
It
is unfortunate that the world's economy -the stock exchanges are a
truly representative model- are only the sum of all our individual
transactional decisions and trusts. Our global markets, our wealth
system, capitalism or how you'd label it, can only ever fail if we all decide
that it must, e.g. if or when we stop believing in it. So did we? To
anyone in the business world, such fatalism is simply not an option. But!
The most rewarding of realities about Human Nature is that we must tire
of negative "depression talk" and will want to refocus
on creating wealth, on trading and on new horizons. If Adam Smith
already pinpointed that most basic of "positivisms" which --together
with human Empathy-- helps us deal with our fellow trader in the market
place, it must be that same quality which once drove us onward and out
of the caves we'd dwelt in. We want to and must move forward, and not
backward, because it is our only way.
At Ribeco, sharing the
fate of the economy through our clients, we struggle but know that we
must keep moving. As it turns out, we're managing pretty well. Maybe
it's because we are, more than managers, consultants. To us will listen, more than managers, leaders.
We learn from them: it's through our clients that we learn to develop
and grow to meet new challenges, at best a little ahead of the pace of
the market. If we're not sitting still, it's because our clients will
not have it: because there is too serious a business to do. It's
business, so it's do or die... The wheels have to stay in motion, if
not "for now" then to be better placed once the economy starts to pick
up and the money flows where our market's needs cause it to build new
value. Opportunity is for the takers.
But for the many
confidence is still lagging. Whether prices inflate or "yoyo" back down
out of desperation, people put their hands on their purse and simply
stop participating. For some reason, our economy stagnates and almost
ceases to be, not like "normal" conjuncture but like total apathy. The Grand Cycles, said of Kondratiev
(even if two Dutch economists wrote about the phenomenon, some
years before him), however much time they may span, for centuries
have "surprised" the market whizzes and, recently, the securities
forecasting software to which we lazily delegated our greedy
judgment. Once more, we were thrown into a Great Depression, even as we
knew when a bunch of "critical" variables would suddenly add up, or
rather, that they wouldn't. This time around, it was the bubble of
Speculation, just as the last time around it was the very lack of it
that led the world to years of Darkness. Back then, a financial coup by
the "Founding Fathers of the Fed" and an allout World War --to
compensate their investment-- were deemed necessary to break the evil
spell. And this time around? What will be needed, now, to
push us forward and make us --once more-- come out of the cave
dwellings of our defeat? If we think about what we are, and how far
we've come, just maybe not so much.
Perhaps all it takes
is to think positive and to think of all the good that's urgently
waiting to be done. Starting each on our own little piece of the world,
to try to clean it up and make it better. So, there's unemployment and
contamination, there's hunger and disease. But there's also Science and
Technology, Resolve and a bit of Good Will. Perhaps there's much more
of such resources, today, than in the 1930s or ever before, accounting
for the inflationary index catalyst that is Progress.
Haven't we
come too far to simply return to those caves, to curl up into a corner
and forget about our dreams? Of course we have. So we look for new
markets, for new ways to dialogue with them and new success stories to
involve them in. For Progress...
"I find the great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving." (Oliver Wendell Holmes)
