Back before the economy went into the shitter, I remember seeing trucks for “3D Ceiling Art” all over the road. Everywhere I went, all day, everyday.
I surmised that a lot of people must be having home improvements done. And business must be booming if a company specializing in “3D Ceiling Art” can not only exist, but have trucks blanketing the city.
Then the economy crashed and I stopped seeing the trucks. For all I know, the company vanished.
But now, I’m seeing a lot of home improvement trucks on the road again and this is what has lead me to believe that the economy is on the road to recovery!
So what’s your wacky barometer of economic health?
The fact that thousands of people have enough bread to travel to the Lincoln Memorial this weekend so they can listen to the ravings of a bipolar jackass.
If people have money, they will take care of their teeth and dentists won’t advertise as much. But if things are tight, dental work is the first thing to go on the back burner. Then they have to advertise. So the more ads for dentists you see, the worse things are.
I’ll present my Ski Jump Theory of the current economic situation. You know that part at the bottom of the long downhill slide where you start going up again … that’s where we are.
It isn’t recovering and we’ll be lucky if we don’t have a double dip recession. Have you looked at any of the articles about how the jobless rate is going to be at around 10% for years? The forclosure rates going up as Evil Captor mentioned? That economic growth is considerably less than is projected/expected/wished for? Geez.
My benchmark is this: when political figures stop going on TV to desperately try to convince people that things are looking up even if it doesn’t look like it, we’re recovering, and there will be no need to tell people about things like “recovery summer.”
Oh, sorry, I didn’t meant to imply that it has recovered already, but that I’ve read doom and gloom that it’ll tank again as soon as it does recover to a degree.
The economy grew 1.6% in the second quarter. That’s not zero or negative, and therefore the economy is getting better. (Joblessness isn’t a true economic indicator, and trust me, I’m happy to be employed.)
Employment is usually so far behind the curve that it is virtually counter-cyclical. If you’re looking for signs of a recovery, that’s the last thing to look at.
What’s interesting to me is that this time around, payrolls were cut so quickly and so aggressively. I think that much is uncharacteristic compared to previous cycles. But as far as new hiring, that seems to be following the standard pattern. In fact, I think businesses are actually being much more cautious than usual.
Banks are wallowing in cash and so are large businesses, but nobody is investing or loaning. Why is that, do you suppose? While the real estate market is the shits, there are other ways to use cash to generate more cash and jobs. Are they really so pissed at the Dems for re-instituting oversight and controls that they will deliberately fuck the American people in order to get another inattentive moron into the White House and turn Congress over to the raving loonies? My money is on “yes”.
Another off-the-wall sign the economy is getting better: Library spending at the local level is going up. During bad times, the library is one of the first government departments hit with cuts and either politicians are realizing that cutting the library in bad times is stupid because people come to the library to look for jobs on the Intertubes or things are looking up.
Apple has sold a gazillion (estimated) iPhones and iPads. Amazon has sold a bazillion (estimated) Kindles. If that many people can spend that much money on digital toys, clearly things aren’t that bad.
(Granted, Apple could sell ice to Eskimos. In fact, Eskimos used to just live in gloos made of ce, until Apple saw a market niche.)
My crazy, off-the-wall theory is that it makes no difference what the government does, because no matter how much money they throw into the financial system, no matter what incentives they provide, it’s about confidence. Until that’s restored the economy will be in the tank.
All of this other stuff is window dressing, just ways for the elected officials to show that they are “doing something”, so that they can be re-elected due to their caring about the common guy and his plight.
The government would be better served by suborning the news media into believing that it’s getting better. When they start sounding optimistic in their reporting the economy will start recovering. As long as all reports are negative people will continue to be afraid to buy things and/or take out loans, and the people who offer loans will be afraid to give them out for fear of defaults.
Not necessarily. This consumer behavior has been noted: “Americans splurge on iPads while broke in new abnormal economy”. If you’ve got a sense of relief that the boom has finally come down and the bank foreclosed on your house – or maybe you walked away voluntarily – you might treat yourself to a little celebratory splurge of $800, while the bank just got stuck with a $300,000 house on its books.
I haven’t seen a de Beers ad on TV in ages (or one for whatever it is they changed their name to). I don’t know if that means people or buying plenty of diamonds, or that romance is dead.
Wait till Christmas, you will see plenty of ads, and mostly they will tout ‘diamond jewelry under $100 (or maybe now $200) for that special someone…’
I look at the ads from K-Mart in the Sunday paper, they are still selling jewelry set with microscopic diamond chips. Something new is the white sapphire in place of a diamond. I suppose it’s a step up from a CZ, or diamond dust.
In other news, houses are selling like mad around here (very low cost of housing, for years now, is the area’s claim to fame though where all the jobs are is a mystery). New housing developments are going up all over!