Friday: A Day Of Bad Trends For 2006

This Friday could not have hardly been a worse day of bad trends. With a reference to Biblical imagery, you could say that "the handwriting is on the wall" where events are likely headed for 2006.

Iran: This nation that is seeking to enrich uranium to possiby build nuclear weapons, has started to pull funds from European banks to protect them against freezing as assets should sanctions, or even worse, war occur soon. Fears over Iran helped to also boost oil prices as well.

Oil Prices: During this last week oil went from $60 a barrel to $68 a barrel today. Today's increase was about $1.50 a barrel. Some business programs on cable now raise fears of $80 a barrel fuel or even worse should major war break out. One program even raised fear images of Israel launching nuclear missiles at Iran in a worse case scenario. All of this helped to create a 213 point stock market drop Friday.

Wall Street Drop of 213 points: Fears of problems with Iran. Iran and the Nigerian war with rebels fears create a climate of possible oil supply disruption fueling higher prices. And lower earnings by companies compounded the problems as well. But the new videos by both Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda's #2, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri helped to create a new climate of fear in the U.S., and worries of new terrorist attacks.

Climate Of Fear: The new videos by both Osama Bin Laden and Dr. Ayman al-Zawahirir helped to color the debate over wiretapping in Congress, and the climate of fear created over the loss of civil liberties of some was colored by a Bush Administration request for the Google search engine to hand over data on search engine use, creating a climate of fear of big government involvement into privacy of the individuals far in excess of any real concerns to protect children from Internet sleeeze is created.

These are a combination of frightening trends that tend to feed off one another, creating an anxious environment of expectation of the worst to happen very soon. This "sky is falling" climate is not only shared by the very nervous, but by the very serious, and those in the mainstream business environment. Wall Street was like a "canary in the coalmine" Friday, a sort of barometer that was a gauge of rising levels of public fear.

2006 is likely to be a very rocky year, with very serious news and events. It's a very good time to dust off that family Bible and pray for stability and peace, otherwise we are merely powerless to a string of increasingly frightening events compounding upon one another that are far beyond out ability to control. If the worst happens, we are powerless to change that. But we can alter our sense of peace of mind and cope as well as possible with this rising tide of fear.

Those that survived holocaust and life in the German concentration camps such Dr. Victor Frankel survived not because they had any more to eat than the other starving prisoners, not because they had any more warmth than the other prisoners in cold unheated prison barracks. But they survived because of their psychological attitude of refusing to give in to personal defeat. This is the key to surviving even when the sky falls.