Recession is in Your Mind

"Recession is in Your Mind"
by Paul A. L. Hall.

The recession is in your mind.  I mean, you can have it if you want to.  That's a bit like giving up, isn't it?  
Some argue that it is also a knee-jerk trend of certain extremely wealthy factions at any given time to precipitate tight money to increase the spending power of their existent wealth.  But you don't have to be a part of that.
Were that to be the case, and who knows, then it's even more shameful for the average person because it then becomes an indictment against them of having succumbed to some sort of prevalent mind-control programs smacking of Big Brother scenarios.  Regardless, I would submit that dissenthrallment is one of the myriad prices of freedom.  As the late Soviet Union may have noted on their way out, to control a people is to deny them the potential of economic viability.  
Others maintain that it's a problem of mass psychology; an aberration in the public psyche that causes economic panic in regular waves throughout the passage of history.  It is curious to note that the oftimes lack of stability in the market seems to indicate that a multitude of investors are mentally ill.  One form of this is the mental illness of compulsive gambling.  It is when the victim becomes obsessed with not realistic success but rather the resultant hormonal cocktail in the brain that results from the thrill of winning and taking risks.  What's wrong with that?  Ask any professional gambler.  At best he or she can be content with little better than breaking even. Everyone else who gambles compulsively will loose big time in order to get that infrequent thrill of an actual win.
Irresponsibility and self-centeredness are both symptoms of the mentally ill.  One day they are Dr. Jekell the next at the report of the slightest difficulty they break down and become Mr. Hyde.  This in itself is a potential cause for economic disaster since that majority of investors that have incurred mental illness becoming obsessed with the self-centered penchant to merely acquire wealth will also, paradoxically, become economically incompetent due to being mentally handicapped and therefore be incapable of responsible investing. 
Concerning these two things, they'll always be there in one form or another and any economy in history must always succeed in spite of them.  Or else.  What?  Or else they loose mercantile freedom, are over-run by dictatorship, and that has happened regularly in history. Another topic for another article.
Those who seek to exercise control of others can be found from the most esoteric of work places to the highest pinnacles of power, economic or otherwise.  No one need disturb them.  They are now sequestered into the mystery of history.  No prosperity need affect them to the adverse.  Because what they have is merely that which is acknowledged by that humanity which they have in their sway.  The reality of true economics is far beyond this type of arena and is as constant as universal physics.  Wherever it's principles are applied and by whomever, true economics will prosper and incur prosperity.  It is simply a plutocracy of those with enough presence of mind to see a need and fill it that will in the final analysis determine the prosperity of a body politic. 
But as concerning the mentally ill, they require compassion and support or else their condition will gradually become less and less treatable.  Of course, the danger is that from their ranks emerge the criminally insane and among these those with the demented wisdom to become perpetrators of so-called legal crimes and also white-collar crime on a smaller scale.  
But all share in one common aspect: legally and otherwise they are not guilty of their acts being insane.  That having been said, they must not be allowed to bring down global economies.  Therefore a robust economy must be able to succeed independent of them as well as of the others.   Let the unfortunate victims remain confined to their padded cells such as the NYSE, the DAX, the All Ordinaries, the Hang Seng  and so on and so forth where they can gambol away their livelihoods on dinosaurs that can be $65 a share one day and 35cents the next for lack of marrying a portable digital camera with a printer. 
True economics is like sunlight.  In fact, energy, often in the form of sunlight, is the economic unit of the ecosystem.  The flow of economics is always there in any given situation and that flow can often be defined by currency either national or spurious.  
That's why businesses exist in the first place.  They perform a function that has been initially defined in currency projection by business plans, recorded or inferred, and subsequently defined by the pecuniary transactions of patronage.  True economic flow is not in the mere currency that is simply the convenience that measures values in transactions, but rather true economic flow is the ever present condition in any location of needed effort or endeavor.
That's why most of these leviathans of the past are not true economic entities, but rather economic illusions to be followed by the visionless.  Here in the second, third and fourth quarters of two thousand one, many huge concerns had extensive assets in the form of human potential they could channel into wherever it was needed, and those assets were in the form of large volumes of established, trained and loyal employees, and what to they do?  THEY DOWNSIZE.  And, worse, they therefore receive congratulation, praise and the accolades of the sophists of the business world. 
Instead of channeling the one asset they truly have, human endeavor, into the needs of the day which they never bother to perceive, they rid themselves of that one faction of their concerns that was of any true value.  Their problem was not in the size of their work force, their problem was in lack of enterprise.  It's like throwing passengers, one by one, off a moving sled to keep the wolves from boarding it.
Today's band-aid is tomorrow's failure; a little patch on a festering wound will guarantee future amputation.  What they need to do is get rid of those big expensive buildings and keep the personnel.  When times get tough, expand the R&D and get rid of the building fund.

That's the problem with the college guys, they learned the past.  History is useful for perceiving the future, but not by amassing huge chunks of that knowledge in such large quantities all at one eight-year sitting that it's forgotten as soon as the final exams are passed.  Realizing how useless that kind of expensive knowledge is, most sensible businesses employ those graduates not on the basis of what they learned but on how adept they are at being able to find things out.  True knowledge is gained by an ongoing combination of both learning and experience.
In the last article I covered the problem with decentralization.  In this one we cover the chain reaction of decentralization and how that benefits electronics, tech industries, durable goods, automotive products so on and so forth.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for rebuilding New York City just as long as it gets shared with other states from Manhattan to Nebraska.  A city that runs laterally for one thousand miles or more.  If they want to build it right this time they should build it along the road.  They almost got it right in the east coast Megalopolipis from Washington to Boston, but the part they got wrong was the huge and opulent city centers with their sky scrapers scattered in the midst of the slums that fed such disproportionate wealth in the first place.
One of the great elements of prosperity was the interstate highway system.  But they are running east and west and North and South.  It was the wrong design that choked the prosperity of the central United States, they needed to run diagonally.  This would make of them the crossroads effect that is so vital to economic engines.  Like cross-hatching on a print, they would hatch equally across the mainland and at every cross-hatch of interstate cross-roads there would be the potential of a successful metropolis.
Take the structure of city systems in the continental US today and multiply it by the available territory in the interior and you have the ingredients for exponential growth.  If the existent city areas were to have direct interstate limited-access carriageway connection with it's counterpart geographically opposite to themselves, the prosperity would be in place indefinitely provided the infrastructure were properly maintained.
It's so embarrassing when businesses downsize their operations just to please a skittish collection of gutless investors.  Speculators are the ruin of any essential enterprise.
As for you, the victims of their latest lack of professionalism. My sympathies are with you.  We should hand them a replacement for their plastic flags.  The black pirate's flag will do them as it would all sunshine patriots.  Don't worry, people.  It's a good thing you got out of those companies.  They didn't deserve you anyway.  Let them panic and sink into the dinosaur tar pits.

Recession is in your Mind (lecture by Paul Hall) ...