Well, I’m with you 100% in the “Insane Optimism” camp and for pretty much the same reasons. I’m a big history buff (particularly business history) and as you point out, many fortunes were made or started in the 1930s. Flicking through the book “The Mirror Makers”, the Depression years were not great but not terrible for everyone either. This quote caught my eye…

“Like Young & Rubicam, radio incongruously grew and flourished in the 1930s, as though the Depression were not happening.”

Love the quote about “not participating”. Saw a letter from Randy Gage recently promoting an MLM seminar and he started with that line! Nice to know the original source.

Re the bailout, well if what we’re seeing is the great unwinding of the credit boom and a process of debt and credit deflation, then it won’t “work” in the sense that it cannot prevent what’s happening. The damage was done years ago and the best the government can do is prevent the banking system from going into complete meltdown and avoid making the situation worse.

Here’s Robert Prechter from his October newsletter…

“As the scope of the problem expands, the full absurdity of the Treasury/Fed bailout gambit will be plain to see. Notice, for instance, that all the bailouts to date, from the $700 billion slush fund for collapsing financial assets to the ban on short selling, is aimed at the financial sector which is already wiped out. This is so because government, by socionomic definition, moves only by consensus and therefore is always the last to act. It follows trends and and attempts to respond after social mood has produced its effects…The sideshow is that government can always be counted on to move too late and in a direction that will do more harm than good.”

Prechter’s “Conquer The Crash” is well worth a read for anyone looking for more details. BTW, Prechter also counts himself as an “optimist”.

Love Marc Faber’s writings as well. “The Great Money Illusion” published way back in 1988 is an investment classic IMHO.

Difficult times ahead, I think, but the USA is a remarkably resilient and resourceful country. I remember back in the early 1990s when we had the last bout of “End Of The World” syndrome everyone was counting the US out, just before this last great boom.

(BTW, I’m English by birth but have lived in Australia for 20 years.)

Enough ranting from me! Once again thanks for your great blog and the wonderful service that you generously provide to the Direct Marketing community.

Kevin Francis

Thanks for the comment and the terrific plugs.

I really appreciate it and it’s nice to have an ex-i-banker weigh in. Glad you liked the Merrill ad too.

Listen, despite appearances to the contrary, I am an insane optimist, though these days, that optimism is more centered on direct marketing and entrepreneurship than it is on the world financial system.

I agree, the post-nuclear, apocalyptic, “bail out of civilization and head for a retreat in the Rockies
with a machine gun turret on the roof” — I love that line — is over the top.

And you’re quite correct about Casey and Ruff being wrong about the timing AND severity of their predictions.

I think the lesson for anyone who desires to follow in their footsteps is to take your worst case scenario marketing and divide it by four.

Sure, they may not get the front page excitement that Ruff and Casey elicited with their Mad Max visions of the future but there are plenty of reasonable analysts who created a very nice and long lasting niche for themselves by being in the right ballpark.

Take Marc Faber as an example.(GloomBoomDoom.com)

As far as the bailout goes, I have my doubts about its long term value. What’ll the country be in $4 trillion of debt or something? Also, it’s unclear whether it’ll be a true relief in the credit markets.

Anyway, George Haylings did okay for himself as a marketer during the depression, as did Sam Walton as a businessman. He had that great line about “deciding not to participate in the Depression.”

Lawrence

Thanks for these recent financial ads. As you say, great templates for current times. As a former investment banker I particularly liked the Merrill Lynch ad you posted a few weeks back (now I think of it, I might use that as a template for a current project).

I’ll add a word of caution here. Great though these ads are, both Ruff and Casey were completely wrong, at least as far as their timing (and in markets, timing is everything). Now, I might agree with a lot of what they have to say, but there’s a long history of “End of The World” books and we’re still here. A much read and loved book in my library is “The Great Reckoning” (published in the early 1990s) as just another example.

As a youth in the 1970s, I read “The Downwave” by Bob Beckman which led me to be a “Perma Bear” for many years and probably ended up costing me a lot of money! LOL!

Now, I do think that we face difficult times ahead. Looks like Bob Prechter might finally be right (he was only 15 years too early)! But, my point is that it’s important to see things as they are, neither worse not better. Of course, if people did that we probably wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place (but that’s another discussion).

Regardless of these comments, agree that these ads are great templates and the fear and “End of the world” themes will sell a ton of product.

Thanks again for your great blog!

Kevin Francis