A Time to Worry?

Sometimes there are things in the news online that just make you cringe. Well, that make me cringe, anyway. Times when a specific story is reporting bad news, without even realizing that the fact this is being reported is bad news in itself. A good example turned up on the Wall Street Journal online site today. This story is talking about how rap performers are being forced to downscale their more outrageous displays of conspicuous consumption by purchasing fewer and smaller items of jewelry. It’s bad news, in the sense that these individuals are a bellwether for American consumer behavior in general; lower budgets for any large community of pop artists indicates that people all over the country (and possibly all over the world) are spending less money on entertainment, and this does not bode well for purchases of larger goods. But it’s even worse that this is being reported on at all…

Consider some of the other things that could be occupying an investigative reporter’s time in the current economic climate. Granted that there’s already enough ink (real and electronic) being spilled about the automotive industry bailouts, there are still thousands of American companies living on a razor-thin margin of survival, millions of Americans who are fighting to afford the basic necessities of life, and hundreds of financial institutions that have effectively defrauded their customers or the government (or both), all of which we haven’t heard about yet. But that’s not the worst part; the worst of it is that this story really is an indicator of just how bad things are getting. As silly as it might sound for members of the rap and hip-hop community to be questioning each other’s authenticity because of the amount of ugly, heavy gold and diamond jewelry they’re wearing (or aren’t), this one story foretells its own far-reaching impacts…

Consider, for example, all of the people who work for the record companies that are drawing less business. Yes, the handful of people at the top may be offensively rich vultures who are getting what they deserve, but all of the people who work for them are going to be impacted by this, too, and most of them are working for low basic wages. Then we have the independent record companies, most of which are entrepreneurial firms run by a small team (or even a single person) who never had huge cash reserves in the first place. The same comments apply to the people who import, design, produce and sell the jewelry in question; the people at the top may not be harmed by this downturn, but all of the people who count on those companies for their living are going to get hurt – and so are all of the people who work for the vendors that supply those companies…

I know it’s a long way around to get to this point, but I think it was worth the trip (or I wouldn’t have wasted your time with it). You’ve heard the old saying about “A rising tide raises all boats?” Let me suggest that the converse is also true; something that is bad for the economy is bad for all of us, no matter how far removed we happen to be from the people who are being directly affected by the bad news…

And I’d still really like to have someone go and ask why nobody thought to stop “adjusting” all of the adjustable rate mortgages BEFORE they managed to put the entire U.S. real estate market into the tank…