Happy New Year, Welcome Renewed Optimism, Welcome

January 4th, 2010

Two hours into Wall Street and everything’s looking good
I love it when a week, never mind a year, starts off like this. You look at the market board and there are no minus signs, no bad news and no-one has gone bust in the last few hours. That doesn’t mean that the day will end up, but somehow a day that starts off well gives one the feeling that all may just be well with the world. Sure we are surrounded by problems, political and financial, and sure many of them look to be insoluble, but there has to be a challenge for the problem-solving machinery to work efficiently.

If we were all the same
Imagine that all countries in the world were the same – same weather, same food, same religion, same economy and same everything. Can you imagine the level of boredom? It would also prevent the development of many items and gadgets that we use in our daily lives and which were developed by the military industries in one country or another… The cell-phone for instance?

America now
From where I am sitting, America appears to have pulled through the worst of the recession but I see a new problem developing. The stock exchange is zooming upwards like a rocket going into orbit. That’s great news, especially for all the stock exchange investors and all the little players like me, who dabble in the hopes of striking it rich. But I hear a great deal of bad news as well. I hear about the raging unemployment and I hear the anguished cries of the many who have lost jobs, fortunes and worst of all their pensions, doomed now to work to the bitter end. Are we looking at the start of a huge new divide between the haves and the have-nots?

My cousin
My cousin visited today. He came to the US about 30 years ago and began working as a freelance photographer. Things improved steadily and after a couple of years he opened a photographic studio, then expanding it until it was a medium sized and successful business. A few years before the ‘crash’ he eased up on the pressure, leased a sleek sports car for himself and began to live well. He had staff and worked fewer hours himself. “It’s all gone,” he said this afternoon. “I gave back the car and bought myself a cheap second-hand job just to get around in. I fired all but one of the staff and I started working 20-hour days again like I did 30 years ago. I’m not sure I’m going to survive this. Nothing is improving for me.”

A glimmer of hope
Is it my imagination or are the financial wizards and the economists finally starting to understand their subject? Were we living in some kind of dreamland before the crash? Are we over our excessive bout of greed and now settled down to living “within ourselves”? Let’s hope so!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Personal / Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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