There's an old saying that the best time to plant a tree is 30 years ago....and that the second best time is NOW.

Add this note to the thousands that have pointed out that this is the time to invest in the market, to reach out to your customers, to invent a new product, and to launch a new career. So why aren't more people doing just that?

Low energy. They don't call this a Depression for nothing.

It's just soooo hard to move when there seems to be so little traction available.

Yet there is opportunity everywhere. If you want some for yourself, you don't need inspiration, credit, or an engraved invitation. Just move. And if the traction is bad and you slip, get up and try it again.

"Nobody rings a bell when the market hits bottom," is the oldest saw in financial services.

Well, ding.

Labels: economics, enegy, ggcb

About 50 yards ahead on the sidewalk, the empty wheelchair stood like a riderless horse. Next to it, on the ground was a pile of old clothes. People were rushing up and down the sidewalk, stepping around the pile of clothes.

When I got a little closer I could see that there was a person inside those clothes, lying helplessly on the ground. He apologized for being heavy as I helped him back into his machine.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"No," he said. "Can you buy me a Big Gulp?"

"Sure," I replied. "What flavor?"

"Root beer."

I returned from the corner convenience store, handed him drink and wished my new friend well.

Then I rushed off for dinner with another friend who serves on the board of The Baltimore Opera Company. Over a better beverage than root beer, she announced sadly that the opera had that day decided to close after almost 60 years of performances. A great social asset is gone -- and it's not coming back.

"We had some promises of money, but there just wasn't enough out there," said general manager M. Kevin Wixted in The Baltimore Sun the next day. "To raise money for a season of opera was out of the question. We could have struggled on month to month, but we'd never get ahead. I know people wanted to believe we'd come back. But in this business, you have to depend on raising big money from people."

I guess they decided to stop putting the opera back in the wheelchair.

It’s a sad but important lesson of the economic downtown: we are all its victims -- from the homeless man on the street to the opera.

Labels: economics, ggcb, marketing

Safety and security, sociologists tell us, are some of the most basic of all needs. Yet one of the great lessons of massive economic downturns is that there is no safe place on the battlefield.

We are descended from hearty stock. Our ancestors were subject to disease, hunger, cold, marauding tribes, predatory animals, capricious royalty, and a medical establishment that believed in leeches. While our forebears hunted the bears, the bears hunted them.

So when the 401K statement arrives in the mail, the most primitive parts of our brains cannot tell the difference between the decreasing balance and a saber tooth tiger attack. At some level, we feel mind-numbing terror. Poverty is staring us in the face. We will never be able to retire. We will be reduced to eating dog food and begging on street corners.

Instinct -- and the fear that comes with it -- does not serve us well. That's because there is no absolute safety, no, not even Treasury Bills.

Our ancestors knew what to do. Did they sit cowering in their caves waiting for woolly mammoth tusk futures to turn? Did they stand idly by waiting for the king to guarantee the grain harvest? Did they stand on the docks waiting for clearer weather before boarding the next ship to the New World?

Nope. We are where we are today because a lot of folks higher up our family trees decided to do something positive to make their lives better. What did they know that we've forgotten?

Labels: economics, ggcb