People love drama and people love keywords. Drama’s exciting, and a nice remedy for the monotony of a peaceful life, and keywords are easy to understand and don’t require that much thought to conceptualize. Your financial news organization of choice knows this, and used both of those concepts to make people practically gyrate with political excitation and even inspire the names of rap albums with a single word: recession.
A couple years ago, “the recession” was an impending malignant force coming to take away all of our money. Now, “the recession” is the verbal embodiment of everything that goes wrong with capitalism.
Words like these — the kinds of words that really stick in the minds of impressionable, half-informed folk — have the power to move mountains. They get people all excited in a way that numbers just can’t — well, for most people, at least — and create a false sense of knowledge. People aren’t ashamed to admit their debilitating lack of financial knowledge in a boom or a bubble, but you’ll never find more economic experts than you’ll find in a “recession”.
That’s why it’s no surprise, even though we have employment numbers now, among other things, to imply otherwise, that people just aren’t getting this “recovery” concept. Recovery is boring. Recovery isn’t dramatic — you can’t make a 5-minute montage of images showing a recovery on top of ominous, doomsaying music and air it on CNBC.
Economists are starting to say that we’re on our way to recovery, and, albeit slowly, we’re almost to the point where we can see it happening in our own lives. Banks are repaying TARP money, the stimulus was a stock market steroid — like it needed to be — and businesses are losing excuses to cut their payroll fast.
But something’s wrong. Comment sections across all the articles I’ve seen today on the economy — I’d love to see an exception to my rule — show only people lifting up their fists with rage to this new school of thought. In this strange language, “stimulus” becomes “waste of federal money”, President Obama becomes the socialist that killed the capitalist star, and — most importantly — “recovery” becomes “impending doom”.
They say the economy is a game of expectations. I hope these people (scroll down to comments) aren’t calling the shots.
