Читать книгу The crisis will be back. What is to be done? - - Страница 7

Take urgent action!

No matter how well you have planned for it, the crisis will strike suddenly – just as with too much alcohol, intoxication sets on suddenly and the brain is shutting down. You may think you are drinking in a measured way, and you do not drink much generally, and you have had enough bite after, and yet – bam! – you miscalculated…

You wake up in the morning to the national currency losing 20—30% of its value or oil prices more than halving, and everything has fallen apart at the stock exchange… Your debts are now doubled; the suppliers, who were so favourably disposed just yesterday, have become your enemies demanding to return their goods. Not the money that has lost some of its value already and keeps depreciating daily, but the product that you have already processed or put up for sale.

You forget about food, about the holiday package you have bought, and you immediately cut short your honeymoon trip. You can feel the shackles on your wrists chaining you to the oars, making you a galley-slave of the crisis. Incidentally, most entrepreneurs do not realise that it is impossible to handle the economic storm – it is as good as deliberately getting in the way of a herd of bison rushing for no apparent reason from distant pastures in your direction.

The economic agony in troubled times resembles chaotic movement of information from one pseudo-analyst to another who is no less “informed”. They are vying with each other in predicting the timescale and depth of the slump, recalling all the crises since the Great Depression. People, with and without money alike, begin thrashing about. Some, to keep their money; others, to dodge unemployment.

Most entrepreneurs act in the same way. These are the laws of the crowd and the psychology of how people behave in the same misery. On a sudden, they need a leader – someone who knows which way to turn. Even those who have forgotten what a TV is about keep turning it on to watch the news. Old business pals are at once able to find an opportunity to get together, even if, for various reasons, they have not seen each other for many years. The world is losing its mind, and an entrepreneur who is unprepared for these changes is going insane too.