The sun is shining this afternoon in Pau. I’m enjoying it streaming through my office window. After this week’s edition of the Economist dropped through the letter box this morning I read the following article and it initially served to lift my spirits… http://www.economist.com/node/21562915. The beginning of the end of the Euro crisis…wouldn’t that be nice?!... However this quickly made me think about another article which I read earlier in the week; http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100180151/the-euro-crisis-stand-by-for-years-of-slow-wretched-decline/. This second article muses over what a recession actually looks like. It suggested that the Euro crisis would never manifest itself as, “lines of men in cloth caps queuing at soup kitchens – and somehow doing so in grainy black-and-white footage”. The article went to say on that, “because journalists deal in drama, they like to frame the euro crisis as a choice between ‘a solution’ and a catastrophic breakdown. But surely there is a third option, namely that people carry on getting gradually poorer. Imagine that you lost your main source of income tomorrow. At first, not much would change. You’d still be driving the same car, sleeping in the same bed. Only as things broke, and went unreplaced, would your poverty become visible. Dilapidation would steal upon you progressively.”
So the question I asked myself was whether or not if we have indeed turned a corner, will people notice, will people recognize how close we came to the edge of economic meltdown, or will people just carry on expecting the government to subsidize bread and petrol (as in France)? Will people actually change their behaviour as a result of recent events, or did things just not get bad enough? Clearly many people were affected negatively and this posting is not to diminish their hardship, but were enough people impacted to actually mean more widespread change for the better? This human condition of only acting when things are really bad is actually quite depressing. In sales we even celebrate this type of behaviour – we rejoice when we find that, “the customer has a compelling event!” Why can’t people just do things because common sense dictates that it is the right thing to do? Surely there can’t be that much of a difference between Northern and Southern European common sense – surely everyone must understand the getting things for free can’t last forever? Surely everyone must realize that having someone else who has carefully husbanded their resources (Germany) pay for those who have not (e.g. Greece) is not right? Unfortunately many of my (sensible) Spanish friends suggest that there is indeed a slew of people who don’t share the same version of common sense that I do. Whilst I clearly am not advocating more recession or depression, it is why I worry that the beginning of the end of the Euro crisis won’t actually make any long term difference. I fear that in time history will simply say that what we’ve gone through since 2008 was just another protracted slump in the economic cycle. Right, where are those sunglasses (not bought using credit)…
So the question I asked myself was whether or not if we have indeed turned a corner, will people notice, will people recognize how close we came to the edge of economic meltdown, or will people just carry on expecting the government to subsidize bread and petrol (as in France)? Will people actually change their behaviour as a result of recent events, or did things just not get bad enough? Clearly many people were affected negatively and this posting is not to diminish their hardship, but were enough people impacted to actually mean more widespread change for the better? This human condition of only acting when things are really bad is actually quite depressing. In sales we even celebrate this type of behaviour – we rejoice when we find that, “the customer has a compelling event!” Why can’t people just do things because common sense dictates that it is the right thing to do? Surely there can’t be that much of a difference between Northern and Southern European common sense – surely everyone must understand the getting things for free can’t last forever? Surely everyone must realize that having someone else who has carefully husbanded their resources (Germany) pay for those who have not (e.g. Greece) is not right? Unfortunately many of my (sensible) Spanish friends suggest that there is indeed a slew of people who don’t share the same version of common sense that I do. Whilst I clearly am not advocating more recession or depression, it is why I worry that the beginning of the end of the Euro crisis won’t actually make any long term difference. I fear that in time history will simply say that what we’ve gone through since 2008 was just another protracted slump in the economic cycle. Right, where are those sunglasses (not bought using credit)…
No comments:
Post a Comment