Doom and Gloom

Sometimes I just loathe the media! This past week, everytime I pick up the newspaper or log onto any news site, the headlines are all about recession, foreclosures, businesses tanking, rising gas and grocery prices, etc. One of our local papers here actually used the word "blight". Frigging Blight! The only time I usually hear that word is in the Passover Hagaddah, along with words like "pestilence" and "boils".
We get it. The salad days of the dotcom and housing booms are over. We don't need to be beaten over the heads with 2x4s.
In the meantime, what the media doesn't tell you is what's actually going on in the world. When my daughter and I walked to the park a few weeks ago, we saw 3 houses that were being moved into. And not by renters looking for a temporary place to sell crack! No, these were families looking to settle into our neighborhood.
Yes, I know why they sold. They are practically giving houses away in our neighborhood that just a few years ago had bidding wars over them. But this is a good thing -- houses are starting to sell (and owners are starting to weed their yards, too!), which means before we know it, housing prices will go back up. Maybe not to what they were at their height, but they will go up.
And, yes, many businesses are going belly up. But squished beneath the dire headlines are stories about more VC firms putting money into businesses.
Society has managed to survive crises like this. Economic booms don't last forever, but neither do economic busts. So keep your chin up and take what the media says with a big honking grain of salt.