Champions Rise to the Challenge

An Investor Friend was recently interviewed by Chicago's CLTV for their March 29th show. One of the questions after a lengthy interview was:

Your business advice is about being like a champion, but isn’t it the American infatuation with thinking like a champion that got us into the financial mess?

His answer was: I would say no. I think it was the greed of a fairly small group of people that got us into this mess. The vast majority of people did not get us into trouble.

Last weekend, the New York Times had an article on Bob Newburger, who began his career on Wall Street during the Depression. He’s 95 years old now, and he is still on the stock exchange floor almost daily. The article, by Simon Doolittle, is titled A Lifetime of Perspective on Wall Street’s Hard Times. Mr. Newburger said that the current recession and the Great Depression share the same underlying cause, which was “greed.” That sounds familiar, and coming from someone who has spent over seventy years on Wall Street, I have to say that he probably knows what he’s talking about.

He mentioned that the experience of the Depression and other substantial shifts in the markets left him with a very useful lesson: “All you really have is the ability to be able to cope with whatever is presented to you.” He knows what it’s like to have to start over. He also points out that while people today are uneasy, “it was desperate then.”

The important thing to consider now is that while things are difficult, they can be handled. We have the ability to cope, and like champions, we’ll rise to the challenge.