Hoarding Behaviors

With that sense of uncertainty in mind, let me turn to hoarding. I suspect that when some of you read the word hoarding your minds immediately turned to the runs on the banks experienced in the U.S. during the Great Depression. (And, yes, those runs really did correspond to the extraordinary sense of uncertainty that accompanied the market/social mood bottom.) But I encourage you to think of hoarding much more broadly than just the natural urge to hold physical cash as mood deteriorates and to consider the word in the context of generosity. As mood deteriorates toward the bottom, all aspects of our generosity (financial, social, emotional, political, and so on) toward others drops dramatically. In some extreme cases it even ceases to exist.