Recession, what recession?

OPINION: You must be joking, a few months of negligible growth and we are officially out of the recession?

Well lest we forget! Those of us who haven't learnt from the lessons metered out over the past eighteen months deserve to suffer.

I must say I'm surprised that economists are talking so positively. It's not that I would prefer a negative attitude; it's just that a dose of realism needs to be applied.

If we simply think that we will revert to where we all were a year or two back, then we might as well borrow heavily and invest in property, and while we're at it, put extra money into finance companies.

Investors have short memories, but grandparents have long memories. Grandparents have, of course, seen the pain and heart ache of recessions and depressions and wars over their lifetimes. They also know, only too well, that one swallow doesn't make a summer.

If we have learnt anything out of this heartache that has seen Mums and Dads lose their life's savings, investors go under because their asset values dropped below their level of borrowings, or retailers go to the wall because customers didn't want to spend anymore on their credit cards, it's that life is about individuals, and people, and we need to start treating them properly. Treating people with respect.

Some old fashioned values should come to the fore, honesty, integrity, conservatism, thrift, savings, and hard work, for example.

But whether we are, or are not, in a recession always seemed like an exercise in semantics to me. What it has shown is that once something gains momentum it can take on epidemic, or in this case pandemic proportions and becomes self-fulfilling.

As I have said before, savings and sensible borrowing is how things should always have been; before the greed kicked in. It doesn't mean the whole economy has to come crashing down. But just as people got carried away over-spending, over-borrowing and over-valuing; their knee jerk counteractions were just as bad too. However you can't stop that sort of thinking, and as in the recessions and depressions that have gone before us; they will come again.

Most will forget, and won't change their behaviours, but if people could just get back to basics in good times and in bad, we can recover from the past and pass these lessons on to our children and grandchildren- if they will listen!

Adam Davy is Managing Partner of BDO in Wellington