Slaven Bilić is to Blame for Everything

Everything would be different and better if the Croatian national football team had managed to qualify for the World Cup. If that had happened, and if they had even been lucky enough to get through the first round, the Croatian economy would be on the verge of emerging from recession. And if all that had happened, and we had reached the finals, the crisis in Croatia would have disappeared overnight and been forgotten. But none of this happened, and the crisis is hitting us harder and harder. Slaven Bilić is to blame for everything. He bears the burden of guilt for the nation having no reason for optimism that could pull the country out of recession.

For the same reason, Slaven Bilić is to blame for Croatian retail hitting rock bottom and staying there. The nation lacks optimism, and without optimism, there is no consumption. If the Croatian national football team were currently in South Africa, Jutarnji list would not have had to feature a dramatic confession from a woman who cut up all her credit cards (except one) and thus reduced her monthly spending from around 20,000 to 2,000 kuna. What message are the newspapers sending with this? People, don’t joke around with cards, cut them up, don’t spend, worse and tougher times are coming. And they don’t care that retail sales are falling, that industrial production is falling because of that, that consequently people are losing their jobs and have even less money for consumption. If that day there had been a victory for the Croatian national football team on the front page, people would have rushed to stores for new crates of beer and a few kilograms of meat for grilling, retail sales would have increased, the brewing industry would have had to ramp up production and hire at least a few more seasonal workers, as would the meat industry…

Consumer optimism, as a variable that influences economic trends, has been carefully monitored and measured for years. When optimism in the U.S. drops by half a percent, stocks on Wall Street fall. And vice versa. When measurements show that consumers are more optimistic than the previous month, investors get excited and stocks rise. And when they rise on Wall Street, they rise on stock exchanges around the world. Including the Zagreb Stock Exchange. Then analysts say that optimism from global stock markets has spilled over to us. And all this because a certain number of Americans in a survey stated that they expect to spend more in the next six months than they do now.

I wonder how much this has to do with reality? It somehow occurs to me that it actually has nothing to do with it. Consequently, I conclude that even the Croatian national football team would not change anything in the Croatian economy even if it became the world champion. Perhaps we would all feel much better than we do now, but I don’t see how anything in the economy would change if I spent all my disposable money on beer and grilling instead of distributing it differently. And somehow it turns out that the question of whether consumer optimism can really stimulate economic growth is wrongly posed. It would be more accurate to say that economic growth can stimulate consumer optimism. And as analysts have recently revised the expected growth (or decline) rate of Croatian GDP for this year, optimism as a variable that influences economic trends should not be counted on yet.