Читать книгу The crisis will be back. What is to be done? - - Страница 4

In times of crisis, it is no easy task resisting the temptation to sell off what everyone else is selling or buy what everyone else is buying. Yet, from the very first seconds, you must protect yourself from public psychosis. You don’t know what to do? You’d better step aside. Don’t make decisions under the weight of what everyone else is doing or based on the predictions of hundreds of analysts. It is better to run uphill from a tsunami rather than stand there pondering whether to dive under the first wave or to get on your surfboard.

Economies can be affected by global corporations, domestic and foreign governments, severe weather, meteorites, or another dictator who, in his desperate quest for staying in power, orders forests to be cut down, rivers to be reversed, sparrows to be decimated, diamonds to be mined in the most heart-rending manner… World market prices can soar or plummet because of a government’s ham-fisted action or the slightest of accidents at a nuclear power plant.

The list of all objective and subjective leverages affecting crises is endless. Nature provides some of them, but most of them are of our own making, waiting in the wings. The seemingly aloof gentlemen with whiskey glasses are always ready to send a “killer dealer” to the roulette table to undermine the currency of any economically weak country in just a few days. They can just as easily drive oil prices down two- or threefold or increase the dollar’s value against all world currencies in a matter of hours.

I think that the Russian crises of 1998 and 2014 when the rouble shrank (fourfold in the former and more than twice in the latter case) were fomented by the Russian government itself, unable to cope with the challenges of the global market. Could anyone have foreseen this? Hearsay and rumours aside, no one around me back then could understand in time what was happening and why the government had allowed this to happen.

From what I saw, businesses crumbled proportionately to the currency collapse. In 1998, the Russian rouble depreciated against the US dollar from an average of six to 24 in a week. In the course of the following year, 75% of all market businesses crashed. In 2014, the exchange rate went from 30 to 60 roubles per dollar. Within two years, half of the businesses, i.e. more than 50% of the entire real market, vanished into oblivion.

Thus, the frequency of crises cannot be foreseen or projected. The invisible hand holding a glass of whiskey is always ready to shake not just the economy of one or several countries but the whole of our not-so-secure tiny planet.

Crises are said to be cyclical – I couldn’t agree more but only in the sense that they are bound to come back. The debate about how often they can be back and in what format is always interrupted by yet another crisis.

In my 25 years in business, I have lived through several painful banknote exchanges and rouble devaluations as well as a global property price collapse that reduced entrepreneurial activity by a factor of 1.5—2. I am certain that even one national leader can single-handedly orchestrate a crisis out of a clear blue sky in the interests of national monopolies or narrow government goals.

When looking for new markets or creating new products, we, entrepreneurs, can never account for all risks. An analysis of all the crises I have personally gone through suggests the following:

– a crisis always strikes suddenly however hard you may have been on the watch for it or tried predicting its onset;

– business activity is brought to a standstill for an average of 1—3 years;

– crises are inevitably followed by business growth, which you must be prepared for if you survived;

– do whatever it takes to survive because it is next to impossible to bounce back from scratch. Even losing 90% of all your business is still a lucky escape;

– there is no room for complacency, thinking that your business will be spared by the crisis;

– reinventing must be your first order of business.