Uncertain times
It seems like we’re bombarded with financial bad news and uncertainties lately. Oil, the credit crisis, the burst housing bubble, stagflation, increased gas prices, you name it, it’s a mess. I don’t know if that kind of news is really becoming more frequent, or if we’re just hearing about it more lately. But it makes me nervous. And I’m a worrier, so that doesn’t help either.
My grandpa commented briefly the other day about life during the Great Depression. He was a young man then, and had a job on a railroad tie gang. He talked about how men would come up from Arkansas looking for work, and how they were so thin and hadn’t eaten for days. He said that he was lucky to have a job, and that the key in those days was to know the people who could get you on.
I can’t help but think that that’s good advice for these times as well. Know the right people, have a variety of useful skills, and be willing to work hard.
March 13th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
OK, talking about the big depression is going just a taaaaaad overboard here. Nevertheless, networking and working hard are both good pieces of advice depression or no depression.
March 14th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Actually the Great Depression may be too mild a metaphor. Take a *real* look at the problems on Wall Street, the monoculture GDP (housing >60%) we’ve had for the last decade, outsourced productivity engines (aka technology creation), etc. It’s really not pretty (I’m a finance “quant” and have an MBA btw).
My grandfather used to tell me about what it was like during the Depression. He grew up in the Kansas “dust bowl”. His parents died when he was young and he got shuttled between aunts. He dropped out of high school a month before graduation after an argument with the principal, so he got on his motorcycle and took off. He ended up tending cattle in the mountains of Colorado on horseback for a year for pennies a day. He eventually went back to his hometown to pick up my grandmother as she graduated high school and they went to Los Angeles (Compton, specifically – at one time it was a white, lower class town for shipyard workers before it got it’s current black “hip hop rep”). He worked in the shipyards through the end of WWII.
Nothing I’ve had to live with was as bad as what he had to survive so I’ve considered myself lucky.