Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Really!? He said that!?

Reading an article in the International Herald Tribune, I just found out that it was Roosevelt who said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

It sounds like one of those really deep, inspiring, rhetorical lines. You know, welling up eyes with tears across the country as the weak finally find strength and the cowardly find courage and we all accomplish things we didn't think we could and othersuch etc etc.

WELL it turns out he was referring to the banking industry!

It's not rhetorical or inspiring at all! It's actually quite a literal statement. Fear, also known as lack of consumer confidences, stymies consumer spending, which makes up most of the American economy. So GDP declines, unemployment rises, there are deflationary pressures on prices, credit tightens even in the face of minuscule interest rates, and overall it's just bad news.

And what is actually keeping America in this mess is fear! How devastatingly practical!

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