End Times

"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Amid the sound of markets crashing around the world, I'm not sure how appropriate this quotation is, but with a bit of a tweak to the original meaning, it somehow sounds right. Churchill used the line in a speech to the British parliament in November of 1942 after the defeat of German forces in Egypt at El Alamein. The first couple of years of the war had been a disastrous series of defeats for the British and their Allies. This was the first major British victory in the war, and Churchill was signalling that a corner had been turned, and that however distant, there was an end in sight.

In the case of the current financial meltdown, there is no end in sight. We're staring into the abyss, but the bottom is nowhere to be seen. I think this is the end of the beginning in the sense that we finally realize that we're in deep, deep trouble.

We (as in those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world) have had a pretty good ride over the years. This is especially true in my case. Over the years I've gotten almost everything I've ever wanted. I've never been involuntarily unemployed. I've never been hungry and didn't know where my next meal was coming from. I didn't worry about paying my kids' college tuition, let alone putting clothes on their backs. That's not to say everything was handed to me on a silver platter. I'm a pretty smart guy, and back in the day when I used to work for a living, I worked pretty hard, but I've never had to use my limited talents to eke out a living in desperate circumstances.

I'm not saying that I'll be selling pencils (or whatever is the equivalent in the digital age) on the street corner anytime soon, but I am saying that the long free ride the West has enjoyed over the last fifty years has ended. It appears that we are now living in the "interesting times" of that old Chinese curse.

On that uplifting note, I think I'll have another cup of coffee and, with a detached sense of morbid fascination, watch the markets melt down.