The Summer of our Discontent

June is the cruelest month, at least in western Washington. After a long winter and a short spring, hopes for warmer weather are often dashed by long stretches of even more cold and rain.

And so it is with the economy. The current recession, now 18 months old, has lasted longer than any downturn since the Great Depression. The occasional ray of hope-—better housing sales, for example—is soon shut out by the dark clouds of rising unemployment.

Uncertainty is the bane of business. Consider our embattled energy startups. A year ago the wind was at their backs.  They were the ones with the technology to tackle the dual evils of rising oil prices and global warming, and investors were eager to support them. Now, as oil prices fluctuate wildly, the money has dried up. Some energy startups may not survive.

It’s easy to say, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself,” but fear is pretty scary these days. Many of us wonder if our economy will ever return to normal.

But then, what’s normal? Certainly not the two decades of virtually uninterrupted growth we had in the ‘80s and ‘90s. During those years it was as if one of our glorious summers had lingered into December. Some of us began to act as if winter had been banished altogether. We prospered as we supplied a growing middle class around the world with ever more lattes, jets, apples and software.

Now as we suffer though these cold, wet days we can think nostalgically of the past, or we can look ahead. July and August are bound to be sunny. They usually are. The good news about the return of the business cycle is that eventually the economy will head back up. That’s the way business cycles work.

In the meantime, we have to make the best of what we have.

Our new state commerce secretary, Rogers Weed, is an optimist who likes to focus on opportunity. He is aggressively pursuing federal money for the state’s energy sector, which, Weed tells us, “could be the basis of a new industry segment in Washington.” He also wants to build a strong relationship between government and business to improve the business climate of the state.

This kind of cooperation, the understanding that we are all in this together, is important to our state’s future. In this issue, we have a story about how Ted Baseler, CEO of Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, helped smaller wineries in the region through tough times because he recognized that his company’s success depended on the success of a thriving Washington wine industry.

But we also have a tragic story of how the Blethen family, through a series of poor business decisions, weakened the financial viability of the venerable Seattle Times. The paper is important to the community, and we hope some way can be found to keep it alive until the economy returns to health, as we know it will, as surely as summer follows spring.

Leslie D. Helm

Editor

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