the enemy he is us

It hit this me this morning whilst watching our finance minister (treasurer) being interviewed just before the G20 summit. For almost 20 questions in a row Barry, an ABC journalist was trying his absolute darnedest to extract a response that could be remotely interpreted as “a new bad thing has happened today”. Clearly, he wanted to fan the fire currently engulfing us. At no point did he concede a single point of optimism that the Treasurer sought to convey. Collectively, I would suggest the media of the world are more than just a little bit to blame for the mess we are in and indeed, they profit from it.

But it’s not just the media who are guilty of this. I suspect that most of us have helped to spread the panic. To many of us who are not immediately affected, it’s just an interesting talking point to spark up our weekend BBQ’s. We might be young with many years to go before we need to access our retirement savings, have sold our shares and are awaiting the opportunity to buy back in at lower prices or perhaps we just have never had shares, secretly gloating that the greedy of the world are receiving their just rewards . How many times have you also heard “I lost sooooo much” this weekend, as if it were some sort of competition to elicit the biggest sympathy vote. In the US, where the contagion started, how bad things can be painted is advantageous to both political candidates promoting change, being a maverick and how different they are to George.

To those of you then, big or small, that are spreaders of the panic then, I would like to just pass on another little titbit that may put things into a little better perspective. I heard it last night, buried towards the tail end of a late night news bulletin. "In light of current financial events the Prime Minister announced his abandonment of his target of contributions to charity and overseas aid of .7 of one percent of GDP in favour a new target of .5%. At the other end of the scale, reality TV show ‘finance advisors’ are telling viewers that one way to survive the storm is to cut down on their personal contributions to charity. To the millions of hungry and sick children of this world then, the current financial crisis is an existential threat. To put it a tad more succinctly, the negative comment you made at todays BBQ helped kill a child. Well done.

So what can we do about it? Firstly, I suggest we all stop looking for external saviours, not Bernanke, Poulson, Bush, Cain or Obama; not the worlds banks acting co-operatively or being nationalised, not the worlds biggest bailout………. It's time we looked at ourselves ... we are the ones that arepanicking ....we have seen the enemy and he is us. We are the ones acting irrationally in response to fear. No-one else. We need to snap out of our self indulgent woes, recognise that most in the less developed world are much worse off and stop being so f*cking negative. As a global economy we have gone into much larger debt to pay off much bigger problems than todays credit crisis. World War 2 destroyed much of the industrial capacity of many first world nations, wasted 5 years of the working lives of the most productive part of our population (our youth) and killed 50 million people. It cost squillions, not just trillions and here is the punch line, it was ultimately paid for by war bonds over following decades with MINIMAL impact to Western economic growth.

So here then is an action list of little things that you can do. Remember.....from little things big things grow.

1. Smile
2. Be optimistic
3. If you hear someone being negative about the financial crisis, tell them to stop killing children
4. don’t sell shares unless you have to
5. look for quality oversold stocks and start buying them, there are plenty about
6. Send an email to Rupert Murdoch or your local media baron asking them to tell their reporters to stop being so f*cking negative.
7. pass this email on to your local finance minister, politician or anyone else in the world who might benefit. (Chain emails sometimes reach millions in a very short time!).
8. and remember, perception is reality. If you think things will get better.......they probably will.