Let me preface this post by saying I am not one of these Pollyanish, always look at the bright side of life, up with people, type of persons.
Now, that being said, I have noticed that we as a nation seem to have become a very pessimistic lot (optimists, please don't reply, I know you're out there, God bless you.)
You see, it seems that every time we get a bit of positive economic news these days everybody's initial reaction is to dump on it and start digging for data that suggests things aren't so great. And again, I'm not saying we're out of the woods yet, and I'm not saying happy days are here again. But we need to put things in perspective here folks.
Last week marked the two year anniversary of Shearson Lehman collapsing. Before that it was Bear Stearns going under. We were on the precipice of complete global financial collapse. At the end of 2008 heading in to 2009 we were losing jobs at a clip of over 750,000 a month! For several months in a row. All tallied we lost over 8 million jobs in a span of just over a year. Our economy was shrinking at about 6% year over year and housing prices were collapsing all over. Those are some pretty grim numbers.
So we're not seeing the Halcyon-like days of the mid-80's or late 90's quite yet. But our economy is a $14 trillion dollar engine. Much like an oil tanker, it doesn't turn around on a dime.
Last month the Case-Schillier index came out and showed improvement in all but 3 of the metropolitan areas they study. Which, on the surface, would seem to be pretty good news. BUT, of course analysts, talking heads, and even some here on Active Rain immediately began to look for the dark cloud.
Why is that? Why can't we just take good news for being good news? God knows we need good news these days after all the bad news we've suffered through the past few years.
Our economy and markets are based psychology as much as they are based on logic and buying/selling decisions. When things are good people buy. When things are bad people crawl into their shell and conserve cash. That's understandable. But we need to start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
This year alone the private sector has created over 750,000 jobs. Not great by the standards of a strong economy, but not bad for an economy coming out of the deepest recession since the Great Depression. And sure, local, state, and Federal agencies are cutting staff, which is offsetting the gains in the private sector. But again, until we start seeing the silver lining we're going to be in this funk for a while.
There are a lot of good things starting to happen. Let's start accepting them as such and stop trying to rain on the parade.
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