A Thousand Pictures

When I was young, older people still spoke of Roosevelt in an almost reverential way, when they talked about the Depression at all. Most didn’t want to. It was water under the bridge, roads they didn’t want to go back down and every other trite way of saying that they were focused on the future, not the past.

Every now and then, though, nostalgia got the better of them. And when they talked about Roosevelt, they used words that they normally reserved for their favorite preachers. Savior is the one that came up most. “Roosevelt saved the country” was what I heard from many of them.

They never mentioned the New Deal or the WPA or any other of the programs he put together on the fly. And he did put them together on the fly.

What they talked about was how inspiring he was. He talked to them and told them how bad it was, but reassured them that things would get better. I doubt that he ever told them exactly how bad it was, but hearing his voice on the radio gave people hope.

He realized quite keenly that financial crises are most often crises of confidence. They have as much to do with psychology as with economics. They are driven by fear as much as anything else.

And they feed on themselves: crisis breeds fear which exacerbates crisis as people act in fear which creates more fear that creates more crisis that goes on and on in a downward spiral until everybody’s broke.

I’m glad that Mr. Obama has been reading Roosevelt lately. He’s inheriting an analogous mess.

So when the Bush administration remained silent for too, too long, Obama spoke up to offer words of hope that had been noticeably absent. Words that calmed the markets at least a bit because it looked like someone was in charge.

The markets are going to be up and down and all over the place for the foreseeable future regardless of who is or seems to be in charge. There’s too much damage to be cleaned up quickly.

And bailouts are a stop-gap measure, at best: they do little but stanch a hemorrhage. They provide little to no long-term relief.

What we need now are words. Encouraging ones that tell us “things will be better.” Ones that reassure us that there is a plan for recovery. That the American dream is not dead.

Many people discount the power of words, but I’m not among them. Roosevelt used them to blunt the Depression. They didn’t fix it, but they gave people hope and thereby shored up the shaky foundations of both our financial and political systems.

Words have power. They hold hope, joy, happiness and goodwill. They inspire. They reassure and comfort. When they are released like the endangered species that they are into native environments, the results can be staggering.

The recovery from this economic crisis will be as much a matter of psychology as of economics. Until fear is fully replaced by hope, the crisis will deepen.

The right words breed hope. And if hope doesn't show its face across the broader markets soon, we're all in for a wilder ride than any of us want. Until credit markets thaw, nothing will change. When those who control financial institutions can visualize hope, then stability and prosperity will return.

Someone has to draw a picture that makes sense to Wall Street and to legislators and their constituents.

And if the sitting President will not, the President-elect must. Even if it's just words.

A picture is not always worth a thousand words; sometimes, the right words, though, are worth a thousand pictures.