Unless your celebrations for the turn of the year were particularly raucous, you more than likely knew exactly where you were when you woke up yesterday morning.
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Even if a precise geographical location eluded you for the first few moments post somnium, a quick glance at your spouse or a furtive peek out of the window probably brought it all flooding back.
It is a much more difficult thing, however, to know where you are in time. That is, your current location on the wheel of history.
There is no point reaching for the alarm clock - it is of no help to you. Neither are the torn remains of your calendar.
But you must discover this most crucial piece of information if you are to have any chance at all at beating the deathly malaise that has paralysed markets and wiped trillions of dollars from savings and investment plans all over the world.
Business, and the markets in which they operate, are cyclical. Bust follows boom as surely as night follows day.
Knowing when boom will turn to bust is the trick that we never seem to be able to master, though.
If there were some sort of formula to predict the cycles of the market with any kind of precision, you certainly wouldn't be reading about it here, for if I had any idea what it was I would take it with me to the grave.
And the history books are not much help either. Historians are very good at recording catastrophe with chapters named like disaster movies. "Black Monday" "Wall Street Crash" and "The Great Depression" would all do well at the box office.
But no matter how many catastrophes the markets face, and no matter how similar they are, we always greet them with utter surprise. How could a stock market crash occur after 60 months of a bull market fuelled by companies that didn't produce anything but hot air?
It sounds ridiculous, but that's what happened in the tech bubble of 2000.
Why would a country's economy collapse when it produces next to nothing and has debt worth more than 140 per cent of GDP? We knew this about Greece before the sovereign-debt crisis, but we ignored it.
Why did we believe Bernie Madoff was able to provide returns in excess of 20 per cent every year,when the markets were giving back 7 or 8 and anything above 10 is a "red flag" for fraud?
Greed blunts the historian's pen and closes our eyes to all warning signs. Only the bubble bursting wakes us up for a moment when we wonder how we got into this mess and what we should do to fix it.
But then, the history books close again and we skirt over the recovery process - a much more nuanced and more important phase of the business cycle.
Closer analysis of recovery rather than the drama of collapse might help us.
The biggest economic problem on Earth right now is the European sovereign-debt crisis.
Perhaps we should look at the recovery of Argentina, the last country to default on its sovereign debt, which it did in spades as it reneged on US$100 billion (Dh367.31bn) worth in 2002.
But by 2003, thanks to some blind luck and a boom in the price of wheat, Argentina was at the beginning of a period of economic expansion that not only helped it avoid the recession that crippled the rest of the world in 2008 but one that is still going on today.
A few years earlier, in 1998, Russia faced a similar crisis. This one, though, was dealt with much more swiftly and decisively. In less than a year, again with a lot of luck and an oil price recovery by way of a helping hand, the Russian economy had recovered to pre-crisis levels.
Both countries faced up to their massive debt burden and crafted policy to deal with it. But in reality there are only three ways to deal with debt - pay it off, don't pay it off or inflate it out of existence. Russia and Argentina did a combination of all three as has almost every government in default since the beginning of time.
Europe needs to face the music in a similar fashion, and it needs to do it soon so we can get on with the recovery stage of the cycle. We need decisive political action in Europe to give us the momentum and confidence to get the wheels of business and history turning again.
So remember the words of Boethius and take heart as you plan your investments this year. "Good times pass away, but then so do the bad," he said at some point in the 5th century. "Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of times like the best, are always passing away."
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