nothing to fear but fear itself

I always thought I got it. But now I truly understand Roosevelt's famous words about having nothing to fear but fear itself.

That fear was at the heart of Great Depression, and it's at the heart of the economic crisis we're currently living through. And I'm seeing first-hand that the difficulty in getting past that fear is, well, pretty scary.

In the last couple days, my wife and I decided to postpone a spring vacation we were planning. That happened after my wife got laid off. A friend told me he's putting off buying the TV he had expected to buy late last year. Now, those are two relatively minor personal examples. But most everyone around the world has similar examples right now, and many much more dramatic.

And of course, not buying that TV leads to slumping sales at Best Buy, which leads to layoffs, which leads to more people spending less money -- for very understandable reasons. It's a truly vicious circle. And the only way we break that is for people to start taking a leap of faith and go back to their normal spending behavior. So the consumer goes ahead and buys that house. The banks open up credit to the company for an expansion plan. The business decides to hold off on layoffs so it will be stronger when the economy picks up.

We all know there are complicated reasons why these things aren't happening. But it really comes down to fear of further risking one's assets, whether it's a person or a business. And that's leading to a lot of short-sighted decisions. Operations cut programs that could be on solid footing six months from now. People put off purchases they'll probably make eventually anyway.

To be sure, there's a lot of businesses and individuals in serious financial peril right now, and for those people spending as usual would be fiscally reckless if not suicidal. That's the kind of irresponsibility that got us in this mess in the first place.

But those of us with some means have to see beyond the daily frightening headlines and believe that we'll come out of this, as we always have. it may take years. But I fear it will take much longer if we continue to be afraid.

Allan Gerlat is editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.

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