The recessionist

"Trees don't grow to the sky and markets don't fall to the floor,"

says Prem Watsa in a Toronto Life article. This small statement gave me hope in an increasingly dire economy.


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Watsa is a savvy business trader, a Bay street boy, the Canadian Warren Buffet if you will. He predicted the economic crash in 1987, Japan in 1990 and the one we are currently wading in. He reacted accordingly by moving most of his $16-billion portfolio out of the stock market and into a secure treasury. He is the guy who is actually benefitting from this economy, buying up cheap stocks while protecting his assets. Why does this make me happy?

Well this is further proof that this entire economic collapse is based on ignorance, negligence and... people spending money they don't have, stupidity, rather. Sure sure, it's easy to say this now, when we all know better, I know hindsight is cheap. I just find comfort in the fact that this is a curable disaster. It came about because the stock brokers had no idea what they were investing in and truly didn't understand the moves they were making. Banks handed out loans to people who really couldn't afford it to suckle the interest from them, but they lost out overall. Why didn't anyone stop it? The business journalists reporting it barely had a clue what they were writing about - how could they if their sources were either uninformed or money-mongering vampires?

Meanwhile, there are a handful of men who saw this coming and have profited. This is comforting because it means there are people who know what they're doing out there, it's only a matter of the rest of us choosing to listen to them and learning from them. If one good thing will come of this recession, it will be the lesson that ignorance is not bliss. We need to ask questions until we understand, we need to challenge those even if they are our superiors. Groupthink is a killer, and the only way we can put an end to it and these little recessions every decade will be if we stop "paying our dues" and stand up and ask what is going on.

Knowledge is power after all. Business is not a psychic matter, it isn't all about gut instincts. A lot of it is calculated and can be predicted. Watsa knows this and we can know it too, if we take the time to learn.


-- the golden girl