Be wary of loaded guns

Have you ever played Russian Roulette, that deadly game of life and death? Well investing your money right now is not a whole lot different than that. You take a loaded gun with one bullet somewhere in the six chambers and you put it to your temple not knowing if it’ll blow you away or not. There’s a five in six chance of survival (or 83.33%), but there’s also that very large chance that you might just put a bullet through your brain. So, you have to ask yourself the question; do you feel lucky, punk? I’m guessing most of you just don’t feel that lucky.

Or, you could look at it as an optimist and say that this is a half-full glass and not one that is half-empty. There’s a big chance that you will hit the big time and that you’ll be able to make a giant chunk of change for yourself. The odds are favoring an improvement in our lot if we play our cards right and yet a whole truckload of us are being pessimistic about our outlook, believing that the inevitable slide will be never-ending. Yes, we are in the midst of a depression but that does not mean that we will never rebound from it. So why does everyone believe that we’re headed for economic ruination?

Think for a moment that your worst fears were to come true and Starbucks were indeed to shut down or, worse still, that the fears we all had prior to the 2009 rebound are still valid. This is to say that

• Government’s piled on the debt to delay the inevitable
• This debt then papered over the cracks and saw markets strengthen
• These measures proved that flaws in the recovery theory held true.

We are not for a minute saying that we believe this to be true in the slightest. But it is possible that it could be true, to bring back the example of Russian Roulette. There are those that feel a lot of those chambers have a shot to the mind that is more than they can take and this breeds an excessive fear that the bottom is going to fall out of the market. It is this sentiment more than anything that is pushing the world economy down even if those fears prove eventually to be completely unfounded. Keep your finger on the pulse and an eye open, because its very possible that an upswing in the economy might be here sooner than you know it and you should be there to capitalize on it when it arrives.