Cartoon

With young kids at home, it is inevitable to end up watching (and sometimes enjoying) simple cartoon films. That’s what made me wish consumers would have SpongeBob’s attitude that consists of always being positive, focusing on the task at hand and not worrying about macro-economics.

Another feature that does not stop amazing me is the short-term memory consumers and investors have. It is almost comical just like Dory, that fish in “Finding Nemo” – here we go again, I guess with young kids my TV now is locked on the cartoon channel. Dory suffers from an extremely short-term memory where she forgets things she said or heard 10 seconds ago. Imagine traveling close to the speed of light and watching time on Earth at a rate of 1 year per second. All human beings would be acting exactly like Dory. It seems that every 10 years or so, the market goes through a big adjustment and somebody from space would be astounded by how stupid human beings are. How can you keep falling in the same trap again and again?

There are many explanations to that. Our survival instinct taught us to forget traumatic events after some time, which helps us move forward. We also need to forget some things in order to take additional risk. The downside is that we keep repeating what did not work in the past. And we never seem to learn that a downturn is a recurrent event that we have to use to be ready for better days.

Still on the cartoon subject, South Park ran a great episode about the economic crisis. Check out this short clip:

Click here to view the entire episode