MAY 4, 2009

Best Of April On Undercurrents

Every month on Undercurrents, we reflect on the past month of posts. In April, the common thread was clearly the economy and its impact on our lives.

We talked about Cheerios investing in its customers, which will help to retain them during tougher times. It’s my favorite cereal and now I have more reason to love it. We talked about getting your resume right for the all the spidering and filtering that can mean the difference between “you’re hired” or not. We talked about paying for school. And we talked about some companies that have taken the economic lemons they’ve been handed and made lemonade.

It all begs the question that someone asked me this past week, “What do you think will be dramatically changed because of the economic downturn?”

I thought about it for a second, but I couldn’t quickly come up with something that I thought would be a lasting transformation. I see this downturn as part of ongoing business cycles. Unfortunately, this downturn is worse than most, but that can mean that the ride back up will be better than most.

Just as there are high and lows of the business cycle, we also tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. In the not-too-distant past, there have been the Michael Milken/Junk Bond King crimes and the Savings and Loan crises, both of which leveled enormous hits on Wall Street and on our economy. And when we had it good, we looked back to see that it was “irrational exuberance.”

Still, I am optimistic that our nation will get back on track and focus on new areas of growth, if only to experience another downturn sometime later. I do believe that the net of these cycles will continue to be positive. I am hopeful that the next economic upticks will come in the form of growth from alternative energy investments, or IT-related innovations or research-driven discoveries in biotechnology. We just don’t know for sure where or when they’ll happen, but I strongly believe they will happen.

In the meantime, there will be anxiety and there will be concern about the economy. The past month of Undercurrents posts are a testament to our collective state of our economic torpor. Even investing icon Warren Buffet seems to have temporarily lost his mojo. What would the Oracle from Omaha say if asked, “What might change now that we’ve been economically tarred and feathered?” In remarks this week, Buffet talked about newspapers and how he wouldn’t buy one at any price. The undeniable downward trend of traditional media has been accelerated by the bad economy. Corey asked about what might happen next in his post, “Democracy, Publishing and Money“. I have been following what thinkers like Walter Isaacson and Paul Steiger have been saying, and my guess is that valuable reporting such as Corey pines for will find an audience, even if it means paying for it, albeit online only.

In the automotive industry, clearly changes are afoot.

In banking, it’s unclear to me that there are any major consumer-level changes. I would like to hope that we would carry less debt and save more as a nation, but I don’t see that happening, barring a much more severe economic downturn.

In my life, it’s an acceptance that the newspaper is dead. I will miss the Sunday ritual of reading The New York Times and The Washington Post. It will be replaced by the massive world of information that is already there, but I haven’t been able to make a Sunday ritual of it yet.