Crunch the numbers. Glue your eyes to CNN, or Fox, or your high octane “news” assault of choice. And for the love of all things holy, do not go 4 minutes without checking the stock ticker. Do so and run the risk of letting the panic subside, if only for a moment.
We’ve moved beyond rational thought and action into an area where questions are not answered with projections, forecasts, or even editorials, and this Time magazine article nails it.
But fear is a persistent emotion, one embedded by evolution in our lizard brains. That’s why there’s no precise economic definition of a market panic; it’s more a psychological than a fiscal phenomenon, simultaneously anticipatory (you think something terrible will happen) and retrospective (you think you have waited too long to avert disaster). Swimmers being dragged to sea in a rip current often try to swim directly to shore–against the current–and end up exhausting themselves. Panic can kill.
Panic. Can. Kill.
Isn’t this what we’re watching unfold day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute?
Watching. Waiting. Swimming against the current.
We’re not talking about Bullhead City, or Arizona, or even the United States. It’s gone global. This market panic has spread beyond real estate and mortgages, to stocks, oil, energy, currency, elections, and every recess of everything. That’s an elephant we can’t eat in one bite. So we keep swimming directly to shore, exhausting ourselves.
So what happens next? Better yet, when?
Let’s get back to real estate for a moment and recognize that there is no global or national real estate market. One does not go out and buy or sell national real estate.
Real estate is local.
It is in these local real estate markets that this all began – and where it will end, too. The question is when.
A half century ago, Kennedy said the Chinese word for crisis is represented by the characters for danger and opportunity.
One of these days some smart people are going to get sick and tired of watching and waiting and swimming against the current. Sometime just this side of exhausting themselves, they will act on the opportunity in this crisis while everyone else is still focusing on the danger. Some time later things will calm down, and the news will tell us it’s OK to go back in the water. The crisis will have passed. The danger gone.
Oh, and the opportunity? You guessed it.
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