Easier to Get Rich than Ever Before

I say: nothing is ever as good or bad as it first appears. And many have observed: one person’s tragedy, another’s opportunity. People tend to over-react and react too quickly to a lot of “bad” economic news, acting as if it is permanent when, in actuality, most is temporary. At the very end of May, when this was written, the stock market rallied on the news of a drop in oil prices. Gas prices rise, gas prices fall, who knows where there’ll be next month?An even better example: how could the threat of “global warming” be good news? Front-page story in the MONEY section of USA TODAY (June 1st) headlined: Corporate America Warms To Global Warming: See Prospect Of Fat Profits From New Products Friendly To The Environment.44% of large institutional investors surveyed saw “opportunity” arising from a growing public zeal for conservation and energy efficiency, fueled, pardon the pun, by gas prices and media focus on global warming.Major U.S. corporations like GE say that addressing climate change offers technology-rich U.S. companies opportunities to make more money, not lose it.Anytime you start paying attention to any economic news story, try thinking about it as a creative entrepreneur and investor, not a consumer; ask yourself: where’s the opportunity here? There most assuredly is one.And on a related note, based on research from The Stock Market Almanac, an Ohio State University study concluded that the stock market’s performance is consistently better by 25% on sunny days than on cloudy days. An Ohio State State professor speculated it might be because people feel more optimistic on sunny days. (Should you wish to speculate, the weather forecast for the week ahead might be more useful than The Wall Street Journal).What we see happening on Wall Street, whatever we read and hear in the news media is colored by feelings as much as fact. Today’s news is just not an accurate representation of today’s economic facts, and savvy investors and entrepreneurs know it.Some big, broad facts: more Americans own their own homes than ever before in U.S. history.More Americans are investors, if only through 401K’s and IRA’s, than ever before in American history.And if you aspire to wealth, America’s the place to be: there are just shy of 8-million millionaires in the entire world, but nearly 3-million of them are here in the U.S.A. But if you think the world’s not a fast-changing place, consider that, according to Forbes, the city with the most billionaires is New York (with 34) but the runner-up is Moscow (with 20).We live in exciting, expansive times, with playing-field-leveling technologies born of the Internet, making it easier than ever for the birdhouse builder in Topeka to do business with a gift shop in Geneva, Switzerland.If you can’t get excited about these times we live in, what would get you excited?