Great Scott! What A Difference Four Years Can Make

Let’s take a little trip back in time.  And the beauty of this is that we can do it without the use of  black holes, a DeLorean, flux-capacitor, or even 1.21 Gigawatts of electricity.

*In the 1985 film Back To The Future, “Doc” Brown proclaimed that he could travel back in time if only he could find 1.21 gigawatts of electricity to power his DeLorean and flux capacitor.  The funny thing about it was that he pronounced gigawatts with a j – like jigawatts.  Forever, I thought that Hollywood had no scientific wherewithal or perhaps thought it was funny to mispronounce a unit of measure that is a substitution for one billion or 10 to the ninth power.  However, I recently learned that prior to the early nineties, giga was pronounced jiga within the scientific community.  Great Scott, they were right!  And just to put it in perspective, 1.21 gigawatts (1,210,000,000 watts) is about 20 million times the electricity used to power a light bulb.*

Four years (and one day) ago a couple things happened in this country.  One of which was of great concern to me and my career and much less concern to the majority of the World.  However, the other was of great concern to people that invest money in this country which includes many folks all over the World.  I was laid off from my job on March 9, 2009, and I’m not sure if this is a complete coincidence or not, but also on March 9, 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 80 points, or 1.2%, to end at 6,547.05, its lowest point since April 15, 1997.  The stock market reached a 12 year low that day which would turn out to be rock bottom and a total loss of 53.9% from its high in October 2007 only 17 months earlier.

I will admit that I poured myself a stiff drink at the end of that day – it was a real tough one.

But now look at us.  The Dow Jones closed on Friday at (give or take) an all-time high of 14,397.07 which is an increase of about 120% from March 2009.  Interestingly, after the market bottomed out on March 9, 2009, it ended that month up over 20% (yes, in one month!) and March 2009 was the best single month for the S&P 500 since 1974.

We are also enjoying what appears to be an improving job market and housing market.  And by God, we’re even starting to build some sizable construction projects again.  In other words, even if I had a flux capacitor and 1.21 gigawatts, I don’t think I’d use them to travel anywhere right now, and certainly not back to March 2009.  They were some scary times that I really hope we don’t have to revisit.  However, if I did have the ability and inclination, I may hop back to 1999 or 2000, but the later 2000’s up until about now could probably remain seared in my memory.  And trust me, I won’t forget.

*According to physicists like Steven Hawking and Albert Einstein, time travel is actually possible.  By traveling at or near the speed of light (according to guys like Hawking and Einstein), one will age much slower than the rest of the universe.  However, it doesn’t appear that we could travel back in time – only forward.  So basically, we could get to the future, but not back to the past.  Therefore, it would be impossible to go back to the future.  Steven Hawking actually gave a very scientific explanation as to why backward time travel is impossible when he said, “If you could travel back in time, where are all the time traveling tourists from the future?”  Very good point Stephen.*

So here we are.  Not in the past, not in the future, but here, in the present.  A present that is not great, not terrible, but definitely improving.  There are enough good things going on right now to be mildly and cautiously optimistic.  But its been a long hard road to get here.

And by the way, since March 2009, I started a construction management company called Constructonomics.  I’m not quite back to pre-collapse levels of income or workload, but it’s going pretty well and we had our best year yet in 2012.

So if I had a DeLorean, flux capacitor, and 1.21 gigawatts, would I go back and try to prevent what happened?  Well, I can’t speak for what would be best for the country, World, or others in general, but for me – probably not.