Is there anything you can do to insulate corporate profits, or individual earnings, from an economic downturn? Meaning, is there anything you can do locally, which won't rise or fall on the tide of the economy at large? Won't Cisco's earnings rise when the economy picks up?Nonsense! That is the wrong question! Individual performances don't suffer at the hands of some abstract economy! The economy is nothing but a collection of individual performances! A crowd does not make noise, only an individual shouting. There is no "economy."Cisco has not been discovered to have made too many routers, in light of an economic downturn. Rather, the downturn is precisely a measurement of the degree to which Cisco has made the wrong number of routers! Cisco caused the downturn, the downturn is internal.Nobody will do better when the economy gets better. Rather, we will all do better when we do better. People are not stopped clocks, waiting for demand for some product to come around to meet them. An economic downturn is your own stupid error, wake up!Or, maybe I'm wrong, maybe errors are measured as economic growth. If so, isn't what we are all waiting for to start making errors again? Are we just printing up bank statements until a random computer glitch tells us we are billionaires, time to spend?There is no economy external to, or independent of individual actions. Moreover, there is not some collective sin of errors of others, rather those who are hardest hit by the downturn are actually the very people who have made the biggest errors themselves.You, you're doing the wrong thing! When you start doing something different, is when the economy will start to pick up! If you own stock, when you sell it, when you unform some of those extra companies, is when the stock market will start doing better.The downturn didn't occur when you lost your job, but when you took it. It occurred when you became a West-Coast investment banker, when you laid all that dark fiber. Errors measured as growth, and corrections as contractions, mislead people.MP