molybdenumprice.gifRecent local news includes the probability that Climax Mine will hold off for another little while before opening fully again, and as a company, who wouldn’t. Like all other commodities as of recent, Molybdenum has experienced an incredible run up and a terrifying drop over the past couple of months. Just look at the prices you are paying at the pump.

I guess my point is, we need to remember that our real assets here in Buena Vista and Chaffee County are the people, our creativity, resilience and care for each other.

Our country as a whole has experienced nothing but a roaring economy for the past fifty years (minus a few blips and dips). I think we are as a whole have become complacent and reliant on forces greater than ourselves. Doesn’t this leave us vulnerable when a big company like Climax decides to pull the plug for a few years?

I remember as a kid going out to eat with my grandmother. Once the meal was finished, she would always wrap up all of the leftovers, including the garnishes, and put them in her purse along with any unused ketchup packets, salt packets and other condiments they put in our bag at the fast food place. It was amusing to me as a young person that had no idea what living through the Great Depression could do to an individual psyche (and therefore, collectively as a nation). My grandmother still has tools that her father made, and she operates under the mentality of “why buy it if you don’t need it.”

I am beginning to understand and appreciate her frame of mind. And, I can certainly take notes from my grandmother. Frugality, prudence, practicality, gratitude for what we already have: these are qualities that I think will become more and more valuable once again.

Lastly, what if….just what if we experience an economic downturn like the Great Depression once again? Are we ready for something like that? Here is an article from the Boston Globe that tries to paint a picture of what one COULD look like (even though the author would say that there is no agreed upon definition of depression). He paints some interesting pictures, some are appealing and others not so much.

“Most of us, of course, think we know what a depression looks like. Open a history book and the images will be familiar: mobs at banks and lines at soup kitchens, stockbrokers in suits selling apples on the street, families piled with all their belongings into jalopies. Families scrimp on coffee and flour and sugar, rinsing off tinfoil to reuse it and re-mending their pants and dresses. A desperate government mobilizes legions of the unemployed to build bridges and airports, to blaze trails in national forests, to put on traveling plays and paint social-realist murals.

Today, however, whatever a depression would look like, that’s not it. We are separated from the 1930s by decades of profound economic, technological, and political change, and a modern landscape of scarcity would reflect that.”

How do we think about this kind of downturn? How do we prepare as a community? Do we realize that our greatest asset is our ability to think and be creative and that this could really be useful in the future?

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