Last week I wrote about being pleasantly surprised by a short speaking tour of Saskatchewan.  In every other place I have visited in the past three months there has been extreme pessimism and concern about this Great Recession of 2008-2010/11.  In last week’s column I described how three different groups of CEOs, business owners and senior company executives were upbeat about the economic prospects in Saskatchewan.  In fact their only concern was that maybe what was negatively affecting the rest of Canada, North America and the world might descend upon them.

I made reference to two companies that had or would soon have patents on very unique products.  One was a supplement company that was close to having the patent on a supplement that, in preliminary tests, seems to lower inflammation at the cellular level in humans, thus slowing the aging process to some degree.  The other company is just in the process of rolling out a patented product that looks like a mouse but is actually a credit …

The fundamental force dominating the global economic condition right now is fear.  The equity markets seem to have no other reality.  Any rally of a day or two when buyers enter the market to take advantage of historic lows in share prices is then wiped out by the longer term, more powerful emotion of outright fear and increasingly entrenched pessimism..

The media does occasionally gives us the heart warming human interest story and tells us of jobs out there but serve this up only after spending most of the time delivering bad news with a tone of concern and a furrowed brow.  We turn on the news, or open the paper with an expectation of learning of something else that sounds bad and, yup, there it is, another story of a company or a country in crisis or people having lost everything. Watching the stock market indices has become a …