The Next Recession?

Remember 1998?

I do... everytime I look in my driveway.

I think it was a great time to be alive... but little did we know what would only be 2 years away... Y2K and the peak of Napster!

I loved Napster, I personally enhanced my appreciation of music through it and was even buying CDs back then... from record stores, not just Amazon.

I think everyone but the recording industry loved Napster - they saw it as they beginning of their end.

Now lets fast-forward to 2007.

It was also a great time.  Even the first half of 2008 was pretty good as I recall.  I was working a ton trying to get through school, but it was fine - jobs were available and I had 2 of them.

Then it happened - the stock market collapsed due to the crash of the 'sub-prime mortgage' catastrophy in the US housing market.

I was working at a major insurance company that summer when it happened... shit hit the fan. 

It was September 2008 and I was going into my last semester of university and to be perfectly honest it didn't really impact me - I wasn't trading in the stock market and all my money belonged to the school.

In 2007, the average person (certainly in Canada) may not have known what the terms 'sub-prime' or 'recession' or 'bail out' really meant... but they sure do now don't they! They have become apart of our vernacular.

To the point where people are starting to ask - when will the next one be here?

For the time being, the US has raised the debt ceiling and even Alan Greenspan is saying "we can always print more money".

Never thought I would hear HIM say that...

But will we have another recession?

Like the Napster example illustrates, industries will come and go.  Sub-prime mortgages (or something similar) will probably happen again... Don't people always want what they can't have?

If you want to see a historical perspective, check out the August 9th article on Both Sides of the Table.  It is an interesting view of the past 3 years.

This past month was an interesting one on the markets to say the least... But what we can see over the long-term is that things (industries, problems, governments, etc.) will rise and fall, but overall we collectively move forward.

Don't think of it as a recession, but simply part of our evolution.  Has our evolution ever been linear? Has the growth of our companies ever been linear?

No - so this expectation of the economy doesn't make sense either.

Our economy and world will continue to go through periods of growth and decline whether venture capitalist spending is strong, or not.

I'm not an economist, but I do watch trends.  While trends won't necessarily predict the future, they say a ton about our past.

When will the next recession be? I don't know.  Will we have one?

Probably.

What do you think?
 
 

The Future Belongs to us!

Kinda sounds like something a pimply kid would say at a high school graduation, eh?

But think about it - How many of you when you were kids wanted to be on TV? Be a singer? Write a book?

As 1999 as it may sound, the internet has allowed all of us the access to do this, to some degree, very cheaply or even free.

Major media industries are changing/crumbling, so this really might be the turning point where all of us do get a have the ability to get a bigger piece of the pie.

Any of you familiar with the show Dragon's Den from the CBC?

The show allows entrepeneurs the chance to present their business ideas to a group of Canadian business moguls, for a portion of their company.  This almost completely cuts out any 'middleman' and puts the financers face-to-face with the entrepeneurs, who are putting their own money on the table.

And what about the music industry? Well I think most would agree that Napster was the beginning of the end of that dinosaur.

Now, SliceThePie (a British site) allows everyday people - like you and me, the chance to finance artists as well as to be paid to rate music.

So my question is this - are we better for having broken down some of these walls? Do you care? What industries do you think will be transformed next?

~Ian