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To our North, in Canada, today is Thanksgiving. To our South, in Mexico, it is Dia de la Raza. Our brother nations here in North America have found things to celebrate in the early days of Autumn, but here in the USofA we have nothing but the pseudo-holiday Columbus Day – something we’ve tossed over our shoulders and given up on.
This may be a measure of our ability to get anything together.
Things aren’t going well and many people would rather hide under the covers for a day than go out and confront the realities of the world. That is the image that comes to people’s minds when I insist on using the word “Depression” rather than “Recession” to describe the economic situation we’re in. The picture is one of personal depression, rather than economic or social. As flawed as that image is it can actually work if we think of this as a “Managed Depression”, a big downer we’re trying to get through without a ton of pain. It’s not impossible, we just need a bit of help. Can we look at it that way?
There are many ways to fight a war. You can have an old fashioned shooting war with a tremendous amount of destruction, or you can build deterrents and alliances through a more careful Cold War. When things get really bad, however, it’s far more traditional to have a Currency War. That’s what Brasil’s Finance Minister Guido Mantega called the world economy recently, putting a name and a bit of Brasilian bluntness to a situation that’s been brewing for a while.
When the National Bureau of Economic Research proclaimed that the recession is over, not many people believed them. After all, unemployment still stands at levels we haven’t seen for many years – and very few businesses predict they will do much hiring in the near future. But looking only at GDP (the sum of all goods and services made in the economy) it appears that somewhere around June 2009 we started having positive economic growth.
That’s great, as far as it goes, but what does it take to create jobs? Running a little regression or two can give you a few potential answers – and none of them look all that good right now.
Too much information. We all have it blasted our way and we all share it. Understanding the limits of what we should be sharing and how we should process all this information is the key skill of our time as the internet becomes the appliance that defines much of our life. Many people have written volumes on this topic, but in the end the choices are all very personal.
I’ve recently started daily updating on Facebook to give people who know me a bit more information about my daily life. It was in response to a number of questions from friends and fans who find Barataria a bit too cold and impersonal. As I advise my clients who have products to sell, the reasons for doing this are not simply to be on Facebook but to use it as a tool to fill a need. The experience has taught me a few things as I work out the details of where my lines for “too much information” lie.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 