Fear and Goading - Is it OK to be selfish during the recession?
People from Rancho Cucamonga will take a $13/hour job in Orange County. That hurts. It’s more of an emotional “I can’t help you” and that’s fearful for me. And also I started a book company with my sister and of course there is a fear when you paying things back on that. But I think just being newly married and not knowing how, what steps to take, where to put our money is hard. Steve and I are new at that and we just met with somebody for taxes yesterday, and I feel like we’re so uneducated and at this time I wish I wasn’t.
Ashley Bradford: I’m single, under 30 and I have this idea that until I hit 30 or take on more significant responsibility like a family, that I would play rather speculatively in the market. And that worked really well for me. I did do a lot of analysis and I played lot of sectors. Because it did seem that one thing that was happening with the amount of hedge funds, when I looked at things that were traditionally unrelated, they were affecting each other. If you’re trying to play the market in a sense that you’re looking at something and trying to base it on the way the world works, say it’s solar or tech, these things can go up and down. And another difference is that we’re seeing reverse trends because you would never guess that produce is related to solar panels but because of a lot of the hedge funds and things like that, they are. So when one fund falls, everything falls. So when it seems like from a perspective of trying to “Well if I think really hard about this” kind of like you were saying, playing your cards right, there’s less logic in the market, which seems to be more right. Actually when you have a lot of people, you have a contingency that are used to accumulating those sorts of moves not based on purely “I’m going to take all of these large safe companies” you have all of your GEs and Bank of Americas falling. That’s one type of investor. The other type of investor is the kind of a person like the cowboy that says “I’m going to buck it up and think this through. I’m going to observe human behavior and guess which sectors are going to win.” And that’s also faltering. So you do have this nervousness on both sides, which changes the way, as individuals, I think, we can interact with the larger market place. Because both of those are options are gone. I guess that’s a little frightening, a little bit humbling, disorienting, because you can’t really play the traditional safe route and you can’t play the pay-attention-to-details sort of methods. I’m having a similar experience with a web business, its web marketing and one of the things that is happening, we have people that are kind of taking traditional venues and their relying more on their website because it’s cheaper to run than actually having staffed people, which is something that is sad to see. I think in the long haul that will be worse for us than better for us, just because it is taking jobs out of people’ s hands.
Jeff: You guys seem to describe a problem that’s like an unprecedented problem; it seems really confusing and so complex. Like whom do we trust for advice in this time? Like where do we go for wisdom? Do you guys even know? Is that even clear? Is that part of the problem too?