Advertisement Lemme tell ya, going broke’s no fun, and being broke’s not much better. Been there, done that, and I’d just as soon not do it again — but the way these things play out, that’s not likely to be my call.
Or your’s.
All I know is there has been an awful lot of stentorian talk by balding men in suits furrowing their brows and purporting to explain the economic arcana that, if the stenorianest of them are to be believed, has put us on the brink of bread lines or of going out in public wearing last year’s label. We’re told that the illiquidity of debt-swapping derivatives resulting from the collapse of high-risk tranches in the secondary subprime market for insecure securities has discredited the underlying good faith and credit in the overnight, inter-bank rate, which results in capital flight to treasury bills and mattresses, leaving your and my gold cards badly tarnished, our 401k kaput and the economy as a whole generally reduced to sucking south wind.
Or something like that.
What I do know is if Congress just had to come up with more money than God made for the six days of creation just so the Western world could make last week’s payroll, there’s something rotten — and from what’s being reported — it’s spread from Wall Street all the way to the state of Denmark.
So, what’re we gonna do?
Dammedifino — and I think that’s a candid quote from both major party candidates for pretty much any office you or I can think of.
But I’d call it a pretty fair bet that we’re in for some tough times. How tough? Well, that’s relative. Not so tough if you have generous rich relatives ... even less tough if you’re one of those rich relatives.
For the rest of us ... that’s hard to say. Folks my age grew up hearing all about the Great Depression — though for the life of me I could never figure out what was so great about it. All I needed to do was grouse about the school lunch for Mom to remind me one more time of her school lunch — lard and brown sugar sandwiches with a dented lard pail for a lunch bucket — and how she was grateful for it because it was a lot more than other kids hoped to have.
Considering that we now have a generation raised to regard lard as toxic waste and sugar as not a whole lot better, for most of us it will be a long free-fall from where we are today to what my grandpa knew as having it tough.
Even so, the prospect of having life as we know it turn to life as we don’t is enough to knot up the stomach and spoil a good supper. It’s the stuff of lonely wee-hour worry fests — am I really getting my thousand bucks out of that sunroof the car salesman convinced me I just had to have? Why do I still have those appetizers that sat so long on my stomach still sitting on my credit card? Is “Wheel of Fortune” that much better in 52-inch high definition?
Then again, there will be a lot of folks who won’t have those particular worries. Having a car that runs. Having enough for dinner. Those are things too many folks have been worrying about for years — but when real estate was booming and portfolios were bulging it was easy to ignore the people whose spin of the wheel came up bust. It was so easy to claim that anybody who wasn’t aboard the gravy train had only themselves to blame. It was the market, and the market could do no wrong.
But now it appears the country’s going broke and threatening to take houses, cars, careers and credit cards with it. A lot of folks who had gotten awfully comfortable close to the top may find out there’s plenty of room at the bottom and damn little there to cushion the fall.
Dammedifino what to do — besides lay in a good stock of lard and brown sugar.
And hang on.
Contact Jerome Christenson at (507) 453-3500 or jchristenson@winonadailynews.com. For Jerome’s comments on this, that and something else check out “Up on the wrong side of the bed” at www.rivervalleyblogs.com/jerome/ or go to www.winonadailynews.com.
