In a wake of the growing world depression the Prime Minister is calling for optimism. Agree? Should we really rely only on high spirits of hope and bravery? We can but that would be very dangerous. I agree, the spirit of a nation and immense bravery of individuals are essential when a nation is attacked, when someone else is to be blamed for your misery but this is not a war time. On the other hand and no matter how comforting this may be we cannot blame a sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US for what is happening. It is our greed that brought us where we are now, it is life beyond our means, it is borrowing as if someone else will be paying the bill and it is a business model where making money is reduced to a few clicks on a stock exchange button regardless of your skills and abilities that are to be blamed.
So what should we do now? Be brave, optimistic, rely on the nation's high spirit, and continue spending and borrowing or even worse, as Sandy Burnett in today's Scotsman suggests, should people who don't want to buy houses in a current climate be partly blamed for the problem? Excuse me but this would only be false optimism postponing the inevitable for a couple of years to make the problem exponentially worse. Instead we should honestly look into a mirror, change our practices and pay back the enormous debt. We've gone too far this time. If the market would be left to react back in 2003, as I originally thought it should, we would be now talking about the end of a serious recession. Instead and without the facade of false optimism the world is now in a depression that is to linger around for a number of years.
