A global shift in consciousness has occurred during October.  Trust and confidence have given way to fear and uncertainty. Plans and expectations have been completely altered or dashed altogether.  Governments, entire industries, equity markets and the majority of the adult populations in the developed countries of the world are staring into a financial abyss that has no correlation to anything any of them have experienced (unless they are 80 years or older).

Governments separately, and then in consort struggle to stay ahead of a financial catastrophe they can’t quite fathom.  Hundreds of millions of people feel as thought they have been punched in the gut.  Standing on solid ground becomes a metaphor desperately longed for rather than a reality.  For every theory about what to do with one’s money there is an opposite one put forth.  Financial volatility seems omnipresent.   All of this has produced a shift in consciousness that is palpable.

When belief systems come under attack or are shown to be false, when institutional reliability becomes highly questionable,  when what used to work no longer does,  when it feels that events point to not just change but disruption, then it is time to do two things.

First, one must change one’s behavior.  As I have written here, it is clear that consumerism will take a severe hit and that the next two years will be a time of a massive economic downturn.  Thrift will become a dominant value in countries around the world.  Risk and debt will become four letter words …

More than a year ago, I wrote a column about two damaged brands. One damaged brand was the “Made in China” brand and the other was the well respected financial brand of Wall Street.  At that time China was dealing with the fact that pet food produced in China was killing pets all over the world and that toys produced in China had extremely unsafe levels of lead.  Also at that time Wall Street was beginning to deal with the meltdown of the mortgage backed securities market.

This column immediately came to mind last week.  In the same week that the $700 billion bail out was being discussed in Washington, China was basically shutting down its’ dairy business due to criminal negligence and bribery.  More than 50,000 Chinese infants have been stricken with life threatening kidney ailments due to the addition of melamine to most baby formula and milk products.  There are two things that are similar to both these crises.  First, the dairy industry in China and the mortgage backed securities market in the U.S. were woefully under regulated.  Second, those in power made firm assurances that changes would be made and that consumers and investors did not have to worry, that the worst was over.   Lack of oversight combined with outright fraud in both cases now results in two brands that will need years to resurrect themselves. They both made me think of the man standing in the alley opening up his overcoat to reveal stolen …