The Economy on the News

My favorite part of the news is the weather report, because it relates to me. The weather guy or gal is not always accurate, but the predictions generally map onto actual events in a pretty gratifying proximity of time. Even when the weather guys flub it, it's still interesting because I wonder how they missed. Sometimes I even start to project how they miss so that I can adjust their reports. For instance, the weather guy on a local station here tends to get the weather events right, he just jumps the gun by about half a day.

That's why I dislike economic news, particularly these days. Not only is there a distressingly long lag time between the report ("Recession!") and actual events, but what the economists are talking about does not seem to actually map onto my own experiences.

For instance, everybody is in a lather about economic downturns. That is likely true. And if you are faced with unemployment, foreclosure, or other problems like that right now, I do not mean to trivialize your situation. It's bad!

But there are a lot of people who are doing just fine right now. If you're not selling your house, kept your job, and are just maybe spending more on gasoline and less on going to the movies, that is not exactly the sort of situation that calls for putting on a helmet and heading for the bunker.

My family always marched to a different economic drummer. For instance, my great-grandparents did not go broke in the Depression. They went broke years earlier. When everybody was booming, my relatives were going down the drain. To them, the Depression was the period when everybody else caught up to them. Actually, they were pulling themselves back together then.

And right now, many of us are not necessarily in financial dire straits. If you're OK, don't fall for the gloom-and-doom stuff. It does not mean it isn't real, it just means that you can't base your financial decisions on what's going on right at this moment.

I guarantee you, somebody will become a millionaire during this recession. And in the next boom cycle, some people will go broke.

The economic news is a different sort of news than the weather report. The weather report should influence our daily behaviors (take an umbrella to work? wear a coat?) but economic news may not have that much to do with our individual decisions at all.