Today I was going to write about how consumer confidence has fallen to a 10-month low and the markets have fallen with it, but I have decided not to. Lately the economic news has been so bad that I feel the Financial Minute has started to take on a tone of negativity. This is going to be a year of recovery and there will be plenty of days with bad news. So, I thought I would try a more positive approach this week and present some statistics in a positive way. Did you know...the United States economy is the largest in the world at $14.2 trillion? Our GDP in 2009 was three times the size of the world’s second largest, Japan. We have historically run at a low unemployment rate and still do compared to most of the world, 91.3% of our eligible workers are employed. And we are home to the largest financial market in the world.
We can achieve a certain sense of pride by comparing ourselves to the rest of the world, but it is not relevant. Historically, if we think of ourselves as a great nation because we compared favorably to others then we would never have put a man on the moon and 200+ years of sacrifice and service would be lost. We have always achieved greatness by challenging ourselves, not comparing ourselves. What we have is tremendous, what we need to do is make it better. How do we raise the number of employed from 91.3% to 96%? How do we get loans into the hands of small business when some banks have cut back on their small business lending by 90%? How do we increase our savings rate, when 71% of our GDP is based on consumer spending?
Answering economic questions is only part of the equation, why have we had a recession every 8 -10 years over the past 30 years is equally as important. A growing economy will hide a multitude of sins and cause the American people to forget their current suffering, not because we are shortsighted, but because we are optimistic and when the pain is over we feel it won’t come back. However, it does and the next episode is only 10 years away if we continue on the same path. Recently, we have spent too much of our future generations money not to focus more of our energy on understanding how we got here and how we’ll prevent it from happening again. Let’s compete with ourselves and remember that making the impossible possible is what we do best.
