NO MATTER how difficult the times may be, Christmas has always been a period for giving and rejoicing. 

After all these years, I could still remember the joy that lit up on a youngster’s face when she got a gift from “Santa” at the neighbourhood Woolworths store when I was a fresh undergraduate in England. 

I guess that for most of us on the financial markets, it is tough to put up with the grim news that have been erupting almost non-stop from Wall Street. It has been more than a year since the start of the credit crunch crisis and there seems to be no end in sight. 

The bad news only gets worse. Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers have disappeared into the pages of history, AIG is on life-support while once mighty Citigroup looks increasingly shaky.    

The toll on the rest of us is mounting too. We do not share the big bonuses dished out to the fat cats on Wall Street during the boom years, but we are certainly sharing their pain.  

There is, for instance, a report in a Chinese evening newspaper yesterday about a young man in Hong Kong who decided to take his grandma along with him to the netherworld, after incurring big financial losses. He wrapped his arms around her to stop her from struggling, as they gassed themselves to death, it reported. 

Then there are the lay-offs made by firms in what may be a  mistaken belief that they can start on a new slate on their balance sheet next year by pushing all the restructuring costs associated with the job cuts to this year’s profit and loss accounts.

It all makes for very grim reading before Christmas.  

Are things really so desperate that some people have to resort to taking their lives ? I should think not.

Until recently, things had been bubbling so merrily that people might have forgotten what it meant to undergo some hardship. For the many who entered the workforce in the last few years, this is the first serious economic downturn which they  have encountered. 

I can recall worse times in recent years. Sars, for example, in 2003. 

Shopping malls literally emptied out, as people cowered in their homes to avoid the deadly virus. If the health crisis had not come to a speedy end, our economy would have literally collapsed from fear.  

My good friend, Phillips Securities’ managing director Loh Hoon Sun, recalled that during this trying period, each week as he passed by a certain shop, he would notice that the prices pasted on its window would be halved from the previous week just to entice customers to buy something. It was scary. 

In economics, we call this phenomenon deflation - shoppers holding back purchases, as they wait for lower prices. Once this psychology takes hold, it can set off a self-feeding spiral that is hard to stop.

Look at Japan. It has suffered economic slumps once and off for the past 18 years, despite cutting interest rates to zero. Home prices have halved, and the country looks set to tip into deflation again, as the current global economic downturn worsens. As for the moribund Tokyo stock market, prices have sunk to a 22-year low.   

Many had berated me for being so dour on the stock market last year when the superbull run was at its heights.  Some even described me as the most bearish writer on the local stock market. Must I be such a party pooper, they asked ?

For instance, when I raised  questions about the $300 million profit guarantee which a China start-up purportedly put up in order to value its business at a cool $3 billion, another reporter took me to task for it. 

Why couldn’t I believe that miracles do happen – that a young firm is capable of making transformational technological innovations ?  Money would sooner grow on trees, it turned out.

Nothing had been heard from the China firm after its attempts to get a backdoor listing on such a rich valuation failed.  

As excesses are being drained out of the system, it is not necessary to succumb to despair. 

Let’s look on the bright side as Christmas approaches. 

It is difficult to be optimistic at the moment. Even the size of the fall in a major market index can take a meaning of its own. 

When I got up this morning, I glanced at the TV screen and noticed that Wall Street had plunged another 444 points last night. It rhymes with “die die die” in Cantonese. It doesn’t seem like a nice way to start the last day of the trading week. 

As sure as the sun rises from the east, I am confident that this financial crisis will burn itself out some day, rewarding those who stay the course. 

In the mean time, count your blessing as you wake up each morning – your loved one, and good health if you still have it. Every step we take will only bring us one step closer to economic recovery.