I'm a news junkie. Have been since I was a nerdy 80s kid watching the nightly news when things got exciting overseas. I remember spending the first part of my summer in '89 watching Tiananmen Square unfold from my sweaty upstairs bedroom on the old Zenith. I really caught the bug in college as I went through j-school (that's journalism school) and even my stint as college newpaper editor, where I was always angling for international news amid local bar scene hoopla.
Through those times, I had a deaf ear for business news. It was incomprehensible, to say nothing of stiff and boring. I still joke about how we journalism majors can't even figure out a tip at lunch, let alone figure out business policy. That was, until I began working at a publicly traded corporation. Even then, it too me years to build an interest, mainly in digital tech.
When I finally took the plunge to get my MBA, it was inevitable. Accounting classes loomed, for crying out loud. If there was a polar opposite to the coursework I took in college, accounting was it. Not far behind was macroeconomics then finance.
I'll be damned if I didn't learn a thing or two, and it kindled my interest, especially in figuring out what the hell all this business news was really about. Until then, I pretty much understood bonds as those pesky certificates grandparents sometimes snuck in my birthday cards.
Looks like those grandparents knew what they were doing. Mom showed me a hand-written ledger the other day. It was all of Grandpa Riggen's bond investments, split between his two surviving daughters. For a coal-miner-turned-farmer who weathered the Great Depression and fixed things more often than buying them, it's pretty understandable why he put that kind of money in federal bonds rather than, say, stock in IBM. Even so, it's an impressive ledger of investments. Hell, I think Mom even showed me because she was a little tickled by it.
So, now, when I hear about China worrying about the U.S. defaulting on its bonds, I actually have some sense what that means, and how it might affect the economy, at least in layman's terms.
Maybe it's one of those ignorance is bliss deals. There was a specific moment about three years ago. I was standing in line for lunch, carelessly staring at the news headlines on TV when I realized that no longer was my job a certainty, that money might not always be there. That things had shifted into a new era. It wasn't the stuff in the news, not some abstraction about mortgages. It was a thing close to home, an aftershock of losing work colleagues to lean times, knowing my long tenure (if I can call it that) is no guarantee. This week that hint of worry came back as I gobbled up more bleak economy news about job reports and debt limits.
Before that moment, I was driven by the "inevitable" boons of getting an advanced degree and a promotion. After that moment -- and ever since -- I'm driven by a harder ethic. Call it perseverance over prosperity. There's no sign it'll pay off soon, and still I'm working harder than ever. The payoff may not be on my paycheck. But, it sure is nice to have Mom confide in me like a grown up.
No comments:
Post a Comment