Sunday, October 12, 2008
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Another Reason You Shouldn't Listen to Recession Monkeys This will be kept short, and I promise I'll use this blog for something other than ranting about the economy again soon....
.. but I caught an editorial by Bernard Lunn, a fellow I've never really taken seriously for a number of reasons.
Back in April, Bernard started writing for ReadWriteWeb, and erroneously asserted that we were in a recession. He's been asserting ever since (and for sometime before, I'm guessing, just not at RWW) that we're headed for gravely dire times.
As I've said, I'll believe it when I see it. I haven't had anyone conclusively demonstrate to me the connection between Wall Street and Main Street, and I've had a number of people refute it.
Back to the thing that set me off today, Bernard Lunn. Today he asked, in all earnest, where the alarm bells were:
Seeing the Blogosphere afire with tales of crisis in start-up land, with emails going from the wise investors to their portfolio companies, makes me think: no duh! Driving with your eye only on the rear view mirror is not smart. I hate to say "I told you so" but some times I cannot help myself. We have been banging this drum for a year. Not that it took a genius to see that a downturn was coming, it was bleeding obvious! We followed up with perspective here and here. When the sky started to fall a few weeks ago we started to look on the positive side.
Wanna know why we didn't hear the alarm bells? Because the false alarms have been going off for ages now. There was only one person that predicted the situation we're in that I've heard mention it in the last three years, and he's not a blogger.
Everyone else has been pointing to our unemployment rate, which is still phenomenal, our GDP, which is still growing, and the price of oil and gas, which is now falling.
They've been, as Bernard so succinctly put it, banging this drum for years saying the bubble is going to burst any second now, and are wondering why we didn't believe them.
Has anyone heard the fable of the boy who cried wolf? Seriously, I can't be the only one to know that tale. Bernard isn't the only one, either. People have been saying we're in a bubble and it's going to collapse on us since 2005, less than a year after the term came into existence.
Here's the bottom line, people: You can't say that the end is near for the entire duration of the boom and when it ends three years later claim victory. It doesn't work like that.
Update: Although I used Bernard as a foil for this piece, he gives four pieces of advice at the end of his post, all of which I agree with. You should read it for that.
Labels: bernard lunn
posted by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins at 9:41 PM blog comments powered by Disqus
