JWM: While I’m self-employed now, my background is corporate accounting with a very large insurance brokerage (Willis Corroon PLC). When I was there, they were British owned and had been in business roughly 400 years (no lie). They were bought up in recent years by KKR and renamed Willis.
I offer this background because I come from a conservative discipline (accounting) and a conservative industry (surety/insurance). While I don’t profess to be an expert in finance issues, or credit or the stock market, I used to work with quite a few people from those industries and stay in contact with them to this day. By and large, every one of them is either “concerned” (on the optimistic end) or “worried as hell” (pessimistic). These are MBAs from good B-schools, accountants with Big 4 backgrounds and attorneys.
In insurance we referred to shifting liability as “passing a burning match”. This resembles a lit stick of dynamite and those in the know, both industry insiders and pundits are beginning to ring the bell – loudly.
I agree about events scaring the hell out of you. Same here and mainly because that gut instinct that tells you when things are bad, bad wrong is going off – loudly.
