Advice: If You Are Seeing “Green Shoots”…
It’s time to clean your glasses.
Over at MSNBC they say the economy is in turmoil.
Initial jobless claims are going up again, after dropping last week. Even with the “Cash for Clunkers” boost, retail sales are down; even WalMart is down.
The continuing jobless claims are down, but that is people coming to the end their coverage.
Consumption is two-thirds of the GDP, so forget this “green shoots”, it’s the brass corroding. You can’t have a “jobless recovery”, because credit has been maxed out.
The commercial real estate disaster has just started and the ARMs are still resetting, so housing can’t save the economy like it usually does. Real estate was the problem, so it isn’t going to be the solution. The fall may be slowing, but the economy is still falling, and that will continue until people can get back to work.
5 comments
*sigh* Sometimes I think it’s never going to end. 🙁
Perhaps we are having a “recoveryless recovery”. Consumers already spent their future earnings… now they have to pay down the debt. Don’t expect them to bail out the economy.
And even if the bottom is in, it will take years to climb out of this recession. I expect it will be like Japan, in and out of recession for the next decade.
.-= last blog ..Grilled Chicken Kabobs with Rosemary and Garlic =-.
Actually, I’m not 100% convinced we actually ever came out of the 2001 recession. Flipping houses made people feel wealthier, but jobs and wages never returned to the 2000 level, and the market certainly didn’t.
Using the Guard and Reserve in two wars, sure as hell screwed up a lot of small businesses.
I would like to believe we’ve seen bottom, but I don’t believe it, and the state and local government lay-offs certainly don’t help.
Median real family income declined for the entire Bush Presidency, for the first time since WWII. So I agree that we never recovered from the 2001 recession. For that matter, we never really recovered from the 1991 recession — yes, we gained those jobs back, but the jobs we gained were largely sandwich artist jobs and call center jobs rather than the high-paying manufacturing jobs we lost. We are currently a nation that cannot even make its own underwear — we would be going commando if not for the Chinese. There is no way that we can have a vibrant growing economy again until we realize that outsourcing a huge portion of our economy to nations that are not our friends is no way to run a nation.
– Badtux the Economics Penguin
You can’t even put up a good fight when you have to import your ammunition and the uniforms require a fiber made in !France!.
The underwear is local pain, as a lot of it used to be sewn at factories around here that have been closed down. Russell, Starter, Vanity Fair, and others used to be produced on the Florida Panhandle and South Alabama.
You have to be a “maker” before you can afford to be a “user”. We don’t make anything any more.