Foreign Perspectives

The current economic difficulties are pretty unusual in their severity and therefore what “we” should do is not necessarily the same as what we’d ordinarily do by ourselves.

Typically, it’s prudent to build up some reserves in the bank to tide oneself over the hard times. However, if we all do that in the moment then chances are that the downturn will go on for a great deal longer than it needs to. What’s needed is for each of us to act as though the downturn didn’t exist as much as possible.

So, for instance, the banks have basically been told to return to normal lending practices “or else”. In fact, they need to do that for their own sake as tightening up on the lending criteria as many had been doing was simply acting to stagnate the economy which is good for nobody, including the banks.

From the rest of us what’s required is that we don’t simply bank any savings that we’re making but rather that we spend them and thereby do our bit to restart the economy.

Whilst your instinct might be to increase the size of any savings reserve as much as you are able, it’s the worst thing that we could do collectively.