We just don't listen anymore!

The third Monday in January is officially the most depressing day of the year.

It’s pretty obvious really…we have drained the last vestige of contentment from the holiday season by telling everybody how fabulous it was, we’re not going on vacation for yonks, most of us have received our credit card bills with our December spend, we’ve either failed with our New Year’s resolutions or are thoroughly miserable because we have been strong enough to have kept them, and, if we live in the Northern Hemisphere, it is dark and cold and we no longer have comforting thoughts of Christmas to entertain us.

I had intended to devote this entire article to such thoughts, until I read a LinkedIn post which lambasted everybody that uses the site to publish anything other than strictly professional content. My personal reply to this individual is that LinkedIn is a social media site, albeit one for professionals, and, as a professional writer with a far greater ‘following’ than I benefit from in my use of Facebook, I seek to touch both the personal and professional life of anybody who is gracious enough to expend some of their valuable time in reading my material.

Yet, if I shot this person down because I didn’t agree with what they said, I would be guilty of the very behaviour that has prompted this post…

…so, let me begin by talking about George Soros. He has forgotten more sage lessons from his life of investing than most of us will ever learn. He is also a democrat and supported the Clinton election campaign with his own money. This is a laudable exercise in backing one’s fundamental beliefs, however misguided they may be.

But, his big mistake in assuming that Trump was a complete buffoon who would spell economic disaster if elected, was to invest with that view in mind and stick rigidly to this line of thinking. I am sure that there are people close to Soros who attempted to make him understand just how foolish he was being, but they invariably weren’t in their 80s and hadn’t made a billion dollars from betting against the Bank of England in 1992.

So, the end result is that George lost that same billion he made almost 25 years ago by lumping on the-world-will-recognise-that-Trump-is-a-loose-cannon-and-democrats-are-better-for-the-US-economy-than-republicans trade…boo hoo!

At least, in inflation-adjusted terms, George can claim that he won more in 1992 than he lost in 2016, but that is not a compelling argument…he should have recognised that Trump was a situation with the potential to polarise opinion (as it had been throughout the campaign), rather than a one-way trade.

As most of you reading this will know, I lost my previous job in January and, with no reputation to defend other than my own, I spent the summer writing freely about what I thought.

Back in June, I suggested that, if the UK populace voted to leave the EU, this did not necessarily mean that sterling would weaken. How my colleagues, if I had had any, would have enjoyed laughing at this perspective!

Yes, I was wrong, but I defend this view because, as I suspected, Brexit has far from been the economic disaster that the so-called experts said it would be. Andrew Haldane has gone on record as describing this as the ‘Michael Fish moment’ (the meteorologist who publically laughed at amateur predictions of a UK hurricane in 1987, retorting that it ‘might be a bit windy in Spain’) for economists.

Indeed, that was as bad as it could possibly get in weather forecasting circles, in the same way as it is hard to imagine a worse scenario than Brexit for the economic intellectuals.

As for the pound, it has plunged anyway. Although this is more to do with fear than fundamentals. It was telling this week that Mark Carney referred to the problems associated with a nascent credit boom in the UK almost in the same breath as stipulating that the BoE’s decisive (but ultimately completely unnecessary) monetary stimulus had averted a post-Brexit economic disaster. Seriously?

The moral of this story is that Soros was wrong, economists were wrong, I was wrong and so was Carney. We can dig our heads into the sand until we suffocate but we must, at least, acknowledge the potential of the alternative view.

Finally, I would point out that mankind keeps giving ourselves a collective pat on the back for our innovative genius. I claim no credit for this, but, as I read early in the week, the discoveries of the industrial revolution were astonishingly breath taking. In 1760 AD, the fastest mode of transport was the same as it had been in 1760 BC…the horse.

While the internet is genius and electronic hand-held devices are to be admired, they are by no means a flying car…we should humble ourselves on this thought alone.

Our success as a society depends on our willingness to listen to others!

But, we just don't listen anymore!