Ian Royle

There is a country song I like by Alabama (incidentally the best country band and ultimately the best band ever!) called Song of the South.  One of the stanzas goes like this;

Well somebody told us wall street fell
But we were so poor that we couldnt tell.
Cotton was short and the weeds were tall
But mr. roosevelts a gonna save us all.

So you see, in this situation news didn’t get to this family, much like how the Great Depression of the thirties really was contained to North America.  News wasn’t instant like today and peoples attitudes couldn’t be corrupted in a few minutes by a steady stream of bad news or good news.  These days though, it’s all bad news.  But when I think about it, the news is reported by people living their lives, some of these reporters writing their stories are embroilled in this fiasco.  Some have houses going into foreclosure.  All of them have to make a living writing interesting pieces that capture the imaginations of the people reading them.  Or they won’t be paid and they won’t make their mortgage payments.  Currently the flavour du jour in journalism is that the sky is falling, depression, or maybe just recession is coming…but it is going to be bad.  People are running scared and more news to scare is just what they WANT.  Yes people want more bad news stories.  But the news reports on what has happened not what is happening.  The credit crunch already happened, it isn’t happening, the recession was built years ago, the effect is today.  Now what is happening is people are becoming more sane.  Spending is reining in.  People didn’t lose their houses today they lost it when they signed loans they couldn’t afford for things they didn’t need.  People lost fortunes in the stock market not when it crashed but when they bought it without paying attention to unrealistic valuations.  It was a game of hot potato with a live grenade and an unknown fuse.  If you are losing now, look hard in the mirror and ask if you played that game.  Speculation is a suckers game, if you look around the table and don’t know who the sucker is, it’s you.  Paul Newman.

But the story of what is happening today is that the markets are back in balance.  Good buys are available and the seeds of a prosperous future are available…TODAY.

That is the news.