The opening pistol-shot of global financial collapse has just been fired...
A Weekend of Chaos
From a financial perspective, this last twelve months reminds me a lot of 2007. If 2006 saw the Irish Celtic Tiger at peak financial roar, then 2007 was more of a phoney roar. The dogs in the street knew something wasn’t quite right although when you looked around or turned on the news everything presented as more or less fine. A soft landing they promised.
Funnily enough, I had a birdseye view of exactly when the crash began. April 2007. I was working as an IT/office manager in a furniture and electrical retail business in the West. In my nearly four years working in that business I had never seen a drop in sales, of any month, compared to the same month in the previous year. In April 2007 net retail sales dropped 40% compared to the same month in 2006. It was no quirky anomaly, the trend continued for the rest of the year and soon after the year-end things got even worse. Somehow, the Irish economy managed to stumble along and mask the true state of the country until September 2008 with the arrival of the banking collapse. The reason I bring all this up now is because in March 2008 we had a very significant warning flare shoot across the sky. The near collapse of Bear Stearns. Over last weekend, I believe we’ve had another Bear Sterns moment, and again, the origin point was in the United States if not quite Wall St.