The Proverbial Box is no more

Thinking outside of that box is no longer an
option.

It's a must.

There's nowhere else to do it.

Thus,
to conclude this historical perspective, we want
to emphasize that the stepping out of the century-
old reference system is graphically visible in
the form of a curve simply popping out of the
frame which allowed ongoing trends and values to
be represented for centuries. This popping out of
traditional referential frameworks is speeding
up, affecting increasing numbers of sectors and
countries, enhancing the loss of meaning of
indicators used daily or monthly by stock
markets, governments, or official sources of
statistics, and accelerating the widespread
awareness that "the usual indicators" can no
longer give any insight, or even represent the
current world developments. The world will thus
reach summer 2009 without any reliable references
available.

Of course, everyone is free to think that a few
points’ monthly variation of a particular
economic or financial indicator, itself largely
affected by the multiple interventions of public
authorities and banks, carries much more value on
the evolution of the current crisis than those
stepping out of century-old referential
frameworks. Everyone is also free to believe that
those who anticipated neither the crisis nor its
intensity are now in a position to know the
precise date when it will end.

Our team advises them to go see (or see again)
the movie Matrix (5) and to think about the
consequences of manipulating the sensors and
indicators of one’s perception of given
environment. Indeed, as we will examine in detail
in our special summer 2009 GEAB (N°36), the
coming months could be entitled « Crisis Reloaded
» (6).

Read.