Blessed crisis

My father was an employer of success. It founded his company in the years sixty splitting of zero and went it developing in the following decades to base of work and of tesón until achieving a remarkable volume of business and a high international prestige. In the thirty years that lasted his singladura business happened periods of big expansion and others of enormous difficulties. But every year, by Navidad, with the family gathered around the table, to the hour of the nougat and the mantecados, so much in the good years as in the bad years, always proposed the same toast: “so that next year it was not worse that this”.

Excuse me this digression nostálgica but remembered it does little when a colleague commented me that in the past Christmass an adviser of Economy sacked of his collaborators saying them “enjoy of these parties because, from now, every year will be worse that the previous”. And just in those are, sure enough. Closed the first quarter of 2012, the data and the indications can not be more desalentadores. We have gone back to go in in recession, follow closing companies, the unemployment does not leave to increase, weakens the internal demand and begins to wane the external, the credit does not flow and everything seems to indicate that the fiscal contraction and the budgetary cut will finish to hammer our maltrecha economy in the next months. The statistics of some key sectors produce true dread: the registrations of trucks are in minima from 1985, the ones of trucks from 1986, and the consumption of cement in minima from 1967...

Do not deceive us. There is not at all in the economic expectations to short and half term that invite to the optimism. The Spanish economy goes badly, will follow worsening in what it remains of year and probably in the following. These are the parameters of the model and to them have to abide by us the hour to take any decision, in the business and even in the personal. The contrary would be suicidal. However, this so shady frame offers us also enormous opportunities. And it is our responsibility know them detect, explore and take advantage of. Opportunities for reinventarnos, to grow or for decrecer, to redirect our production to other sectors or to other markets, to change the model of business, for aunar our efforts with the ones of other companies. Or even, why no, to finish of once with what no longer has remedy and start afresh with other horizons.

Are time of big changes. The landscape no longer will be the same when amaine the storm. It will have caused big devastation but will have been cream new trees and others will have strengthened . Immersed in the rawest of the tempestad and seeing in the sky the threat of the black clouds remains little place for the hope. But it is in the darkness where is easier to detect the tenuous shine of a cerilla.

My father was cream in the year twenty-nine, the year of the big depressesion. My grandfather went to the exile after having struggled in the front and my father and his brothers had to put to work to the eleven years. They lived duramente the postwar period and the rationing. And they were hungry. As almost all the world in those years.

Those that happen of the fifty, those that already comb canas or those that have little that comb, do not know what is to be hungry. We are the first generation that has not had to live any war, any big epidemic, any big depressesion. We sustain a State of the Welfare that, in spite of the cuts and the ineficiencias, guarantees to all the world a suitable sanitary ware coverage and education for our children until the sixteen years. Any of the generations that preceded us enjoyed of so many rights and of so much level of welfare. This is like this, and goes it to be followed being, although the GDP fall us 2% or the unemployment put in 23%. Blessed crisis, had shouted our grandparents if they had had then the situation that today describe as dramatic.

Are happening a bad economic moment and will worsen in the next months. Not to assume it would be naïve, and act without taking into account it, an enormous temerity. But no otean in horizon the four riders of the Apocalypse. My father went back to wish the past Christmas that this year was not worse that the previous. And maybe his wishes do not fulfil for the group of the economy. But for each one of us, procure that it was not it is of our exclusive responsibility. There is not place for the wail and less still for the resignación.