Steven Hodson, over at the Inquistr blog, says “the sky isn’t falling” and “What do we get instead? We get people like Robert Scoble who have for the last few days done nothing more than highlight everything bad going on.”
Ahh, yes, ye olde blame the messenger post.
See, all week long I’ve been saying we’re in a death spiral. They argued with me last weekend and on Monday before the market had its worst week ever. Ever.
They are still fighting with me after I’ve been talking with CEOs, investors, normal people, and reading thousands of feeds and watching CNBC nearly around the clock.
Funny that even the experts are wrong. CNBC’s Fast Money show has been calling for the market to go up on every show this week. It, instead, went down down down.
I prefer to tell people the truth as I’m hearing it, even if that truth is tough and nasty.
That said, if you’re watching my posts here I’m looking at this like a hurricane moving across our economy.
It hit New York three weeks ago. Then it moved onto other parts of our economy (auto industry is getting hammered right now, for instance).
My radar screen shows its full effects have not yet been felt in the tech industry for a variety of reasons. But it is headed here.
Now, what happens in a storm? Some trees topple. Some stand tall.
But right now to try to smile and say everything is going great and you should be optimistic is wrong. Sorry, it’s wrong.
It’s time to take steps to make sure your businesses are strong and can withstand the storm. If they aren’t strong, it’s time to fix that and fix that fast.
As the storm passes over us in the next quarter (financial results are still to come, so there’s still a couple of bad quarters to come, particularly with consumer electronics companies and retailers as they get a full sense of how bad the Christmas buying season will be) we’ll certainly see winners and losers.
Last weekend I was really freaked out. I was right to be freaked out.
Today I’m a lot more calm and am “working the problem.”
So, Steven is right too. The truth is often in between two extremes. But I won’t apologize for losing my head on Monday. If you had listened to the optimists and had bought on Monday you would have lost another 18% of your wealth. If you had listened to me and sold you’d have a lot more to buy back in or to use to keep paying your bills over the next year or two.
It’s why I keep asking questions here, too. I don’t have all the answers. Heck, I don’t have many answers at all. But the neat thing about this is you can share your opinions and views of what’s going on and give us ideas for how to ride out the coming storm.
Post a URL if you have some good ones, we’ll all appreciate it.
