It is a hard place that is made more difficult because of the need to put into context for the public what are mostly abstract concepts. Even though we use the terms billion and trillion with ease, most of us don't truly understand how big these numbers are.
I've been searching for an analogy for days that can best describe America's economic predicament.
What should be easier to understand is how interdependent the world's financial systems are.
I ran into a cigar buddy of mine this weekend by accident while I was picking up the Sunday New York Times at the Starbucks down the street. I hadn't seen him in awhile, so I ended up sitting outside the coffee shop with him for about an hour, catching up on old times. The obligatory comments about the state of the economy came up. My cigar buddy's industry seems to be doing okay, but he's moving to Tampa later this year to be near company headquarters. He is building a house in Tampa that is practically finished, two months ahead of schedule. He's got a house here in Atlanta that hasn't sold. And he has no illusions about selling it at a price that might allow him to take any money away from the closing table.
After trading comments about the Obama administration's efforts to get the nation back on its feet financially, he made an observation. "We've been through this before. It was really bad in the eighties. The thing is, we didn't have the internet then, so you weren't getting emails about how the world was about to come to an end, or all these websites that are nothing but cesspools of conspiracy theories. There's just too much bad news floating around these days."
This echoed President Obama's comments in recent days about the purveyors of the "economic websites" who have been trying to analyze what's going on without the benefit of having a complete understanding of the ramifications that any bailout actions taken in the banking sector could have on the rest of the world.
I said to my cigar buddy, "Obama is a big time, big idea type of guy. I think he should have just shocked us. Just told us a big number - 5 trillion, 10 trillion - and snapped our heads back hard enough for us to realize just how hard we're all going to have to work together to get beyond this."
Since we can't wind the clock back to 1989, or 1974, or any other time in history where we were going through a national economic crisis with only the barest of information being funneled to us through network news and the press, our government officials may have to seriously reconsider how they choose to communicate with a populace that has an increased capacity for understanding complex problems and vastly improved access to alternate sources of information and opinions.
Because at the rate we're going, even my grandmother will be able to figure out that if we keep throwing money into a hole in the ground, which is pretty analogous to what we're doing with the banking bailout funds, and the hole doesn't seem to be filling up, then we need to stop shoveling any more money in this hole for a minute and drop a rock into it to see how deep it really is.
Most of our major multinational corporations are American in name only, with much of their business coming from customers located in places like Jakarta or Hong Kong or Mumbai. The legal contortions these businesses go through to do business in foreign countries have generated a maze of organizational structures to satisfy local requirements, structures that may risk the loss of their ability to operate in these locales if the parent company's ownership structure goes from private to public ownership.
The best analogy I could come up with this week about the economic crisis? The billions of dollars we are putting into A.I.G., the multinational insurance company that appears to have a tapeworm in its coffers, are like the electricity flowing through the meter box from the power company that is affixed to the side of your house. If the little metal disc behind the glass covered opening in the meter ever stops twirling, nothing inside the house that requires electric power will work.
But the house in this analogy doesn't represent the United States - it is a metaphor for the entire world economy, one we are all connected to whether we like it or not.