On more than one occasion you may have heard me refer to my good fortune as my ability to “Forrest Gump” my way into things. I don’t really have a strategy or master plan but things seemed to have worked out for me. Other than knowing I wanted to go to college, I had no idea how great Marquette was going to be. I wish I could say I had some master plan around my recent Jamaica experience but I was really just making that up as I went. And I can’t even claim some kind of prescient insight around quitting my job at a time when more and more I.T. work was being shipped overseas. Time and again it seems like I made out pretty well without really trying when just a wee tilt of factors in a different direction could have led to a more harsh and unpleasant reality.
I’m adding a new one to the list: selling my condo and getting out of the housing market when I did. It wasn’t like I had any prescient insight into the value topping out. It just seemed like the right move at the time.
Indeed, blind luck beats skill and daring every time, and thank goodness. We appear to be in some kind of market free fall right now. The Dow Jones is on a perpetual slide, prices are rising as food and fuel play a bit of push-me-pull-you right now, and if Chicago is any indicator of a bigger picture, home values are falling quickly. I’m only just starting to get into this stuff due to my recent foray into economics as I apply to graduate school, and though I’m the greenest of econ rookies, even I know something is seriously wrong. Right now, the future does not look smooth and whoever comes in to the Oval Office next January could likely have an economic wasteland on their hands.
And maybe ducking in to graduate school at this moment will prove to be equally fortuitous. Time will tell. This could also be a slight course correction leading to a continuation of fairly robust growth and all the hand wringing will be for not. Though it doesn’t feel like that, and if the decision making track record of the rubes that have been running the show is any indicator, we are in big, big trouble.
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