Reasons to be cheerful

Wednesday, 15th October 2008 18:40 - by Resident IFA

I have arrived back at the office, quickly checked that everything is still as I left it, and settled down for a quick ‘surf’ around some News sites. On the ‘Business’ homepage of a single site, I found the following headlines and article links: - Shares tumble on recession fears - Jobless rise highest for 17 years - U.S. retail sales decline sharply - Rail passengers face higher fares - Home loan numbers at record low - Daimler to axe 3,5000 truck jobs - ...and the list goes on. The one chink of light in the whole page was news of Asda and Morrisons cutting their petrol prices to under £1 per litre. They say “You have to go there to come back”. Well, are we there yet?! I haven’t heard any pundits calling ‘the bottom’ of the market yet, but let us hope it is not too far away. The trouble is, we have the knock-on effects to deal with now, even if the market regains some stability. Look again at the key words in the above headlines – ‘recession’, ‘jobless rise’, ‘decline sharply’, ‘higher fares’, ‘record low’, and ‘axe’. At the risk of sounding evangelical, we are now reaping the pain from the bad seeds we sowed...extreme consumerism, taking on immense personal and corporate debt, the creation of ‘intricate’ financial instruments, bad Governmental economic housekeeping, etc. I saw a poster in the office of one of the major London share dealing rooms today which I think sums it up well. It must have been a 2nd World War Government poster, declaring “Keep Calm And Carry On”. Quite! What else can we do? My next Blog will provide an update on the imminent availability of lse.co.uk’s share dealing service...how exciting! Until next time...