Early November is when I start trying to knock the following year\u2019s schedule into place. This time around it\u2019s rough going. For starters, my wife hid my stash of Halloween candy, resulting in a very uncomfortable nutritional deficit. How can I face 2012 without a brace of Snickers bars at hand? How indeed? I\u2019m starting to feel positively undermined.<\/p>\n
And for another thing, many Saipan Tribune readers are going to have their pocketbooks undermined next year. I think 2012 will be the year when a lot of economic risks really start to show up and smack us around. So let\u2019s glance at next year, out of nervous reflex if nothing else, and then we\u2019ll take care of some recent business here.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just the world\u2019s mainlining of toxic debt at issue now, but it\u2019s the structural distortions created by the debt. So even if Santa Claus paid off all the debts in the entire world with a magic credit card, we\u2019d still be left with a lot of economies that can\u2019t walk straight. <\/p>\n
And this debt thing isn\u2019t just a phenomenon of Western democracies looting themselves into decadent oblivion. OK, it\u2019s mostly that. But there\u2019s also some debt weirdness lurking in industrial Asia\u2019s realm, too. It\u2019s likely that industrial Asia, 2012, is going to look different than industrial Asia, 2011, does. <\/p>\n
There are other factors to heed, too, such as geo-political and military factors, as the world seems determined to keep the front pages lively. Our neighborhood in the west Pacific is growing potential flashpoints like zits on prom night. I hope everything stays cool, real cool, in this realm, but even if it does it will be a very tense cool.<\/p>\n
If there\u2019s one certainty for the coming year it\u2019s that Saipan\u2019s overall approach to economics will remain entirely emotional. So if you\u2019re looking for some stability in this topsy-turvy world, some constant that you can always count on, well, there it is. <\/p>\n
The emotional tone of things drives my colleagues totally bonkers. But I like it. I consider it a certain kind of Saipan charm, a magical rainbow of soaring unicorns and sparkling sunshine. Why not? Beats the heck out of staring at equations all day. But, as charming as it is, there can be pitfalls in the long run. Namely, from what I\u2019ve seen in emotional venues, when economic scarcity finally becomes a reality, then everybody gets mad at everybody else, and that\u2019s not very charming, is it? <\/p>\n
So I\u2019ll channel some Kipling: \u201cIf you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.\u201d Well, if you can, I think you\u2019ll be better off than most. <\/p>\n
Ah, but I\u2019m getting ahead of myself now. So that\u2019s enough glancing ahead at 2012. After all, we\u2019ve still got some unfinished business to attend to, namely picking up the trail from last week\u2019s column in a little project that took on a life of its own. <\/p>\n
The whole thing got started when a reader e-mailed a query about one of the English language\u2019s wackier eccentricities, namely its inventory of words that sound alike, but which aren\u2019t spelled alike. <\/p>\n
So I wanted to list a few such words. A few, I say. But the brain spider I unleashed on my head dug up 131 examples by last week, 65 of which I printed in this space. <\/p>\n
Which brings me to this week. The list now stands at 152 examples. Enough already! I am going to run out and buy a celebrity gossip magazine so I can follow Kim Kardashian\u2019s latest exploits, which will hopefully push this word list out of my head for good. <\/p>\n
In the meantime, I\u2019m going to post the entire list on my website. I\u2019ll try to post it by this afternoon, which means I\u2019ll have to find it first. That\u2019s right, I have to find it. I suspect that my wife hid it along with the candy bars, since I\u2019ve littered every car and every writing surface with scraps of paper upon which I jotted the words as they occurred to me. A day of that might sound fun, but doing that for a week is probably a very obnoxious routine.<\/p>\n
So, drat, I can\u2019t find my list. I can\u2019t find my candy bars. And I think my pet brain spider is starving from a lack of caramel nougat. You know, for a man trying to square himself to face 2012, I think I\u2019m off to a really bad start.<\/p>\n
[I]Visit Ed Stephens Jr. at [URL=”http:\/\/tropicaled.com”]TropicalEd.com[\/URL]. Ed is a pilot, economist, and writer. He holds a degree in economics from UCLA and is a former U.S. naval officer. His column runs every Friday. [\/I]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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