Economic Optimism

PANIC! That's a catchphrase at work, coined probably by Lori, the Director of Operations. We always seem to be under some ridiculous last-minute deadline when a client calls in wanting the world created in 7 minutes rather than 7 days. Whenever someone mentions the deadline or we get a new graphic e-mailed to us, Lori says "panic." She has posters all over her wall with panic written on them -- ways to avoid panicking. Once, right after I started working at TG, I asked her if she likes panicking. She quickly told me the point was NOT to panic.

I'll admit I've picked up the catchphrase. Which brings me onto our topic: the Economy. I wish people would stop panicking. I know it's easy for me to say because I'm 25 and I won't retire soon -- I don't have to worry about how my 401K is going at the moment. I'm not really invested in the stock market, so it does not directly affect me that stock prices are falling (though the inevitable large indirect effects are pretty terrible). I just.... it seems that the Economy does worse when everyone panics. Why not just practice some economic optimism? Make safer investments but try to do things that help the economy grow.

There is a wonderful quote that I got from Daren's Quote of the Day (which you can subscribe to by sending an e-mail to
DarrensQotD-subscribe@googlegroups.com -- free publicit, Darren)


"This is not 1929, and we’re not going into a Great Depression. More than 1,300 banks failed in 1929-1930, and we’ve had only 15 bank failures so far this year. Unemployment was 25% then - versus about 6% today. When FDR took over in 1933, a shocking 44% of all montages were in default. And the stock markets? What is it now, down about 35-40%? From the late 1929 to mid-1932, the Dow Index dropped 90%. People, let’s all calm down. It’s pretty awful out there, but we’re not headed for a Depression."
-Joe Garrett of Garrett, Watts & Co.

It does a good job of expressing my sentiments. I admit I am no economist but people need to calm down. We seem to be at an age where stockholders and business persons expect and demand constant growth and increased profits. There reaches a point where you can't continue to grow business into new markets to make a profit -- if you are good at what you do and your business has value, then you should be able to sell a core product in a certain number of markets and be successful. I have to wonder why all these gigantic corporations were allowed to merge, citing that they needed to in order to remain competitive. Instead of being competitive, they are monopolistic giants with too much of the American, and inadvertantly global, economy tied into them. The era big business is not over -- but business doesn't need to be quite this big. CEOs don't need to have compensation packages of the hundreds of millions even when they fail.

I know these are simplistic ideas about the economy -- I know I'm really making a controlled rant at this point, with little real informatione except what I glean from the news and from conversation with friends and coworkers at the proverbial water cooler. But surely there is a smart way to deal with this. Surely there are productive ways to fix this rather than pointing fingers. If the government is going to do anything, it should look at long-term solutions.

Makes me want to write my congressman. Don't bankrupt the country; don't bailout companies and put them back in the black. Give them what they need to stay afloat and ask them to do the hard work of figuring out how to keep their companies alive without firing all of the workers who actually do the companies' work.

But let's come up with solutions instead of panicking.