Patience Wheatcroft is Non-Executive Director, Barclays Bank, and former editor, Sunday Telegraph. She chaired Edelman’s Gazing into the Crystal Ball: The Outlook for 2009 in December 2008.
There were few optimists to be found in the audience last December when Edelman persuaded four brave individuals to gaze into their crystal balls and divine what 2009 might hold. Yet it is now clear that the pessimism quotient was far too low. Talk then was of whether the ‘R’ word might be applicable. How quickly the tenor of debate has moved on, through recession to depression and on to the length of the protracted slump into which we now appear to be heading.
While some political and business leaders – as well as the media – have talked of downturns, perhaps a more useful economic observation from a US businessman came from Steve Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, who said recently that ‘What we now have is a fundamental economic reset’.
Not only does that sound rather less miserable than depression or slump, it encapsulates the need for more radical thinking than we are currently seeing to deal with the effects of the financial melt-down now reverberating around most of the world and that can, at least in part, be traced to the collapse of the sub-prime housing market in the United States.
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