"Vanilla Toffee Credit Crunch"

I suprised myself when I realised I hadn't said anything about this year's hot topic, the very avoidable recession that is hitting europe. And what gets me is that it was very, very, avoidable - and still is, because Economics relies soley on you, the customer, and whether or not you want to purchase something. As a Business management student, I know a couple of things about economics, and so the basics are this: when consumers want to buy things, prices go up, which means that businesses can afford to pay bigger salaries, which mean that people can buy more, etc. when in a recession, the opposite happens - prices go down, businesses pay their wokers less so their workers cannot buy as much, which means prices have to go down further, etc. Such is the circle of business, becase it is not a case of "us the consumer" and "them the businesses" because most of us work and earn a wage out of those businesses incomes, because we are working for them. Yes, sad though it is, money really does make the world go round - without money we would live in a barter society - money just means we can exchange goods or services now for payment of goods and services at another time and place, exchange and trade will always happen.

But back to the point in hand, the growth or negative growth of the economy can be easily steered by consumers - if everyone decided not to worry about the recession and started spending what they were spending 2 years ago, then the economy would resurrect itself very quickly.

So who is to blame? Three sets of people are to blame - Bankers, Politicians, and Journalists. Or in other words Lehman Brothers, Gordon Brown, and Robert Peston.

Why are the bankers at fault? well they were the ones who lost our confidence in the first place. These were the guys that, once exposed about how they are all lending money to each other and really they didn't have our money, we immediately lost our trust and confidence in them, took out our money, and banks started going bust all over the place as other banks decided they wanted their money back too, to pay off their customers. This is how it all started, and this is where we lost our confidence in the banking system. Because we were unsure about the safety of our money, we decided it would be best to curb our spending to save what we had left of it.

Then I blame the politicians - Gordon Brown had a choice for ways to resurrect the economy, and he chose the wrong one - either the Government spend the money into our economy to start it all working again, with businesses producing more, so consumers spend more, etc, or they put it in the hands of the already worried public. They did the latter, and since the public weren't particularly happy about spending their money at the time, no matter how many tax cuts the government threw at them, the recession was certainly not going to be helped.

And finally I blame Robert Peston. Yes, this man has single-handedly nearly destroyed our economy simply by reporting how badly it is going, how steep the recession is, oh, doom and gloom - If we had had one, even one journalist in the public spotlight as much as peston was, who said that actually it wasn't so bad, we can actually put a positive spin on the recession - look consumers, prices are going down, so we can get more for our money - then the economic downturn would not be as down a turn as it has been.

I'm a blogger who get's only a few hits a week - but at least I can tell those people to go out shopping and bring this avoidable recession out of where it never needed to have gone...