KEY POINTS:
Not everyone in business tightens their purse strings during a slump.
Just flick through chapters of economic history and see how some of the world's richest businessmen - Joseph P. Kennedy, Aristotle Onassis and New Zealand's rich-lister Graeme Hart - used a downturn to make millions.
Onassis, known as the "Golden Greek" who amassed an estimated US$500 million ($660 million) fortune, built his famous shipping empire at the peak of the Great Depression.
In 1930, seeing ship prices had fallen to bargain levels, the slick businessman swooped in to buy six freighters for US$20,000 each.
He continued to buy ships throughout the following decades until, by the late 1960s, he had built up a fleet of about five million tonnes.
Much of this tonnage comprised supertankers and it is said Onassis was one of the first to recognise their value. Onassis said he financed his ships using OPM (other people's money).
And, in much the same way, he closed contracts to transport ore in ships he didn't yet have, and closed contracts to transport oil on tankers that hadn't yet been built.
Kennedy, father of President John F. Kennedy and Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy, also worked the Great Depression in his favour.
An entrepreneur with a strong banking background, he was able to manipulate the unregulated stock market when he became a broker in 1919.
Prompted by a shoe-shine boy's speculations that the booming sharemarket could not sustain itself, Kennedy cashed up just before the market crashed in 1929 and pocketed millions in profit.
He was also reaping profits from his investments in Hollywood's film industry.
Kennedy clocked up an even larger fortune when his company, Somerset Importers, became the exclusive American agent for Gordon's Dry Gin and Dewar's Scotch during the Depression.
Anticipating the end of prohibition, Kennedy accumulated a large pool of stock and sold it for a profit of millions of dollars when prohibition was repealed in 1933.
Hart is one of the few New Zealand non-property entrepreneurs to have ploughed through the 1987 sharemarket crash and come out as one of the country's richest business people.
Quick to learn from the crash, Rank, the listed company on which Hart was a director, sold its Pacific Rental business with an asset backing of $1.03 a share and no debt.
In 1990 Hart took advantage of a controversial asset valuation and bought the Government Printing Office for $23 million.
After the purchase, the net profit of Rank rose from $1.1 million in 1989 to $10.4 million in 1991. The company's name was changed to Whitcoulls when it bought Rank from Brierley Investments for $71.2 million in 1991.
Over the next two years Hart acquired another six companies, the share price soared and he was worth $2.75 billion in last year's NBR Rich List.
