It’s a whole year since I admitted to the world – via my blog – that I didn’t notice the Global Financial Crisis. And I’m celebrating my ignorance with a redux of the post. Husband forwarded the original blog to all his business journalist mates and their faces went all Munch’s The Scream-looking as they read it. They wanted to know if it was a joke. No, Husband said, it wasn’t a joke. It was his life.
And yet, somehow, we make this relationship work.
Anyway, here’s the blog again, in case you missed it the first time around. (I’m on the road for Father’s Day. Too busy to fresh-as-a-daisy blog. Happy Father’s Day to any dads reading. Husband is getting ugg boots and a back scratcher. Hope your present is as cool as that.)
“I just found out about the Global Financial Crisis. And I kind of wish I didn’t know. I’m all freaked out now. It was really, really bad. The entire world economy could have collapsed. And then what would have happened? Husband brought home a movie called Too Big To Fail – which chronicles the US treasury’s fight to save the US banking system going under. We watched it last night and I was glued to the TV. (I think it helped that it had lots of big-name celebs in it – I have this weird crush on Bill Pullman – but the subject matter was pretty gripping too.) Halfway through, Husband asked if I was tired and wanted to go to bed. I replied, “No! I need to see what happens next …” He was a bit offended, because apparently he’s written lots of insightful features on the subject in his capacity as a business journalist. I try reading his insightful features, I do, but my brain freezes up and all I see is “blargle largle largle”. Give me a story about the state of Brad and Ange’s carefully crafted, media-savvy relationship and my brain starts working again. Deplorable but true. What makes my complete non-awareness of the GFC particularly stunning is that I was living in New York when it all went down. And Husband was studying the whole shebang at business school (while I went slightly mad taking care of the Sprogs in a teeny-tiny apartment). Still, I somehow remained blithely unaware. I must have blocked my ears and gone “lah, lah, lah” every time he said the words ”stock market” and “trouble”. Also, we didn’t have a TV or radio at the time. I occasionally bought the New York Post, but mainly for its sensationalist crime stories (or the excellent ones about people keeping five panthers and six pythons in their one-bedroom apartments in the Bronx). And so we eventually returned to Australia – where things weren’t quite so bad – and I cheerily got on with my life. Not knowing how close we all came to losing everything. How close we could come again. My chest is getting all tight, I must stop thinking about it … too late … take deep breaths … it was three years ago … things will be fine … won’t they?
Oddly enough, things seem much closer to not being fine than they did a year ago. Everyone’s frozen in financial indecision as Europe teeters on the edge.
Oooooh, I sounded vaguely like I knew what I was talking about just then. Maybe I am getting slightly wiser as well as older.
housegoeshome 
Alana – I think you were spot on. The GFC was everything the media made of it, and not a lot more. Had they made much less of it it might never have been quite the same deal. I know Stuart will want to have a big argument with me about this, but confidence is the core of the markets, and the media like to feed fear and greed, one is lack of confidence, the other is surplus. So it might be that by not reading the news you did, in a small way, make the GFC just a little bit less bad. If we’d all done the same -i.e. ignore it – especially those who ran out and sold their shares, closed their bank accounts, stopped lending money, sold their house… etc., then the GFC might never had happened… Weird, I know, but sadly a little bit more than partly true.
I never really thought about it that way Nic. That makes me feel like some sort of clever crusader rather than a nong. Nice!