Saturday, October 31, 2009

A long, cold winter.

Anyone else getting the feeling that this is going to be a long cold winter?

The judge is ready to throw us into jail until we admit that we -- all of Bend -- didn't quite handle our finances right.

The stock market has been fun. I put in my IRA cash, in March, and then what was left of Linda's cash, in September. But in both cases, it was because I felt the market was going up, not because I felt the economy was turning around.

I've been feeling uneasy over the last two weeks, but decided that the extent of my 'market playing' would be choosing when to put money in -- but after that, it was going to stay.

The last two weeks in sales have finally met expectations -- which isn't a good thing. I had already decided to cut back, so my instincts were right again and I'll probably not actually lose money in November. Just playing out my experience -- with the uncomfortable knowledge that I'm bound to guess wrong eventually.

Going into the "Great Recession" I had figured it would be a 7 year event -- 2 or three years down, two of three years bouncing along the bottom, and two or three years getting back to square one. So, we're only halfway through that process. You might be able to add a year or two more to Bend, because we were so excessive.

I had a whole list of 'bad news' that has been coming out in the last few days, but I think I'll pass. I think I'll bundle up, and put my head down, and just weather the storm.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"had a whole list of 'bad news' that has been coming out in the last few days, but I think I'll pass"

Sounds interesting ... you could simply state them as facts and let us judge for ourselves.

Duncan McGeary said...

That probably sounded more intriguing than I meant.

I was referring to things like the drop in visitors, 9 banks failing, Tami Sawyer, etc. etc.

Actually, butter has a pretty good list in the comments section of BB2.

RDC said...

It usually takes around 5 years for an economy to go through a deliveraging event. However, in our case the Government has increased debt as fast, if not faster, then the commercial side is deliveraging. So we are following the Japanese route and they are 20 years later and still having problems.

The only way an economy that has too much debt gets out of the problem is by getting rid of it and there is some pain involved in getting rid of it. Unfortunately we do not seem to have learned that lesson.