[F218]Financial News With Personalized

If I said to you, "aren't you sick and tired of hearing negative news", I would feed into more of the negative news as there is chance that my question could trigger a negative response. Aside from that, I wonder what it is about some people that seem to enjoy being right about some sort of pending doom and gloom.

I believe that we give the news media a bad rap and the reason I say this is because of Ian's Brown's February 26th article in The Globe And Mail - Divas of doom find their fame in pedaling the direst of fortunes to pessimistic masses - Bleak is chic as demand grows for dark oracles of blood-filled streets and 'zombie banks'.

Ian's article isn't talking about the doom and gloom of blood in the streets, civil wars, the collapse of Eastern Europe, and toppled governments coming from the news media. The bulk of the bad news in the article is coming out of the mouths of university professors.

I mentioned Ian's article to Robert Gignac, author of 'Wealth Is A State Of Mind', at dinner on Tuesday, March 3rd and Robert's response was that these purveyors of Financial Armageddon have been around for years and publish the same book every five to seven years with a different cover ... sooner or later they will be right. It's like the 36,000 DOW, sooner or later, it is going to happen as I recall someone saying in the early eighties that the DOW will never go past 3,000 points. Let's all hope that prediction does not come true today.

My interest in Ian's article is not about the doomsters and their predictions; it is about why they do it aside from the $50,000 speaking fees. There has got to be more to it than "bad news sells".

On one hand we have the oracles of bad news and in the other we have the unconscious masses.

Ian writes that we seem to enjoy hiding under the blankets, being told how bad the future looks and that it shocks us into feeling like grownups and getting real and at the very least we should stop and take a closer look at what we are afraid of. (for a day in my life of taking a closer look at what brings up the fear in me, see the following article - Do Something That Scares You! )

It is like we have to become five years old again and get slapped and then be put in a corner to take a 'time out' and beg for forgiveness.

"There is a peculiar human need to contemplate disaster," Vivian Rakoff, professor emeritus in the department of psychology at the University of Toronto says. Because there is the sense that if it gets bad enough, we can start over again".

BTW - Rakoff is not a doom and gloomer.

There seems to be a thread in writing about and reading about doom and gloom.

As I get into this I want to preface that I am only wondering about all of this and wish to shed some insight and it is not my intention to attack. I say this because I believe that I will make real whatever I attack.

The creator of the doom and gloom could be attacking the system whether the system is right or wrong because they lack fulfillment in some way shape or form and still have something to prove. They could have an unconscious negative belief of "if I can't or didn't make the system work for me then I will attack the system in an attempt to destroy it and try to make everyone else as miserable as I am". A person will get their need to prove met in a functional or a dysfunctional way, this law is non-negotiable.

The reader of the doom and gloom could be stuck in some kind of pattern that goes back to when they were five years old and sent for a time out awaiting forgiveness from the matriarch or patriarch that sent them there. Their past time out is now replaced with taking a bad news break expecting that good news will show up and that they will be forgiven for their sins.

This same pattern reminds me of what is happening with some corporations who were asleep at the wheel for the best part of the decade having to go back to the government for forgiveness in the form of a bailout.

So here we are in the process of having a financial time out waiting for the matriarch and the patriarch of the money to forgive us for our senseless ways so that we can start anew.

I believe we are in one of the most significant times in history where governments on a global scale are reinvesting in infrastructure to jump start the economy without having to experience a world war ... this experience that we are having will pass.