Sunday, September 28, 2008 Sun.Star Essay: Bush crunch By Erma M. Cuizon
IN the US, Asia and anywhere else, there’s an economic downtrend. The words used could also be economic slump, decline, drop, collapse, fluctuation, and, of course, crunch---today’s defining language of the world’s economic turning point.
Being a “non-economic” person with no business sense, even terribly bad at ‘rithmetic back in school, I only suspect something’s wrong when prices become impossibly high or my favorite items are gone from the market, my purse almost empty, and there’s no credit opportunity in sight.
Imagine me as a consumer---a thoughtless one, I’d just go on with shopping spree even though I hardly can afford it. I don’t count the change I get, I don’t make up my mind on what to buy, I’m at the mercy of store girls’ sales talk, I don’t save. I’d hit the city for new boutiques, or do restaurants and bars until the wee hours of the morning and over-spend on gas.
In the US, basically a consumer country, financial writer and editor Nilus Mattive says, “The last time American consumers spent more than they earned was during the Great Depression. Now they’re doing it again.”
Now there’s a crunch.
There was a time when the meaning of crunch was only one---that exercise known as curl-up, which is said to be a safer exercise than the sit-up---to work out the abdominal muscles, in particular, the rectus addominis, as physical therapists might explain it.
Today “crunch” is an idiom of something going wrong somewhere, so, the solution is to try and solve it with things to do that wouldn’t be easy nor painless but would solve the problem, hopefully. Or so it looks like that to me, a resolve prayerfully intended to solve the problem. A crunch doesn’t hurt as much as a sit-up…
For one, a credit crunch is a situation when you can’t easily find anyone willing to lend you money, resulting in “a sharp restriction of the money supply.”
Imagine if there’s no bank or capital market willing to lend you money for your business!
Just a look at the education sector would be enough to scare any official out of his wits. A school over a hundred and 37 years old is losing enrollees like it never did before; others are closing, up to 30,000 pupils are moving out of their parents’ traditional favorite schools due to high fees, as of this writing. This includes established schools in the country.
Pupils are moving on to free public schools.
But the fix where the educational sector finds itself is only a bit of the problem for America. Writer Mattive says, “It’s easy to see what’s got everybody down: Conflicts and terrorism, rising gas prices, higher interest rates, signs that inflation is ramping up, as well as job-related worries.”
It’s quite a handful.
And something is really wrong if George Bush could finally sense it. When 9-11 happened, he was in a school in Florida having a photo-op with children. They say he was already told of the terrorist act in New York before he reached the school.
Today America is in the middle of problems but it looks easy to Bush. I read in the Internet about how he interpreted the falter of the economy.
From where I am, I know little of the whys. Who knows why exactly some things are happening, except the word we take from economists.
The way George Bush sees it is like some kid down the block who’s acting grown up.
The article is about Bush speaking before a fundraising group in Houston, Texas last July where he said, “It (Wall Street) got drunk and now it’s got a hangover.”
No, he wouldn’t tell media this, it’s said no one from that sector was invited to the affair. The audience was asked not to use cameras while he was on the platform.
But someone recorded it and showed the speech on the Internet. Try YouTube and scream.
