naked capitalism

Meteor Blades says:

Personal recession: my wife who provides about two-thirds of our income as an administrator of the largest collection of publicly funded adult schools in the country is slated for 29 furlough days in the fiscal year that began July 1. That’s a 15% pay cut.

James says:

Let’s see. (Caveat: I’m not an economist, but I do thoroughly enjoy this blog.)
I completed a Master’s Degree in May 2008. Following that, I was unemployed for 23 months, and finally landed a temporary job well outside of my field in April 2010.
Since then, my personal economy has gotten slightly better: I no longer have to struggle to come up with rent every month, but I also can’t afford to save any money or get sick or injured due to laughable temporary “healthcare” coverage.
In 2 to 3 weeks, I’ll be moving into full-time status in the position that lies well outside my field, and should see a significant increase in monthly earnings. But I’m also getting ready to move into an even cheaper apartment-hopefully closer to work-and I’m looking for ways to cut down on my food and entertainment costs, and generally trying to make things last.
So is the recession over? I don’t know. For me, I guess it is nearing its end, for a time, but I doubt we’ll see 2005 levels for many years. And given the census report, monthly job numbers, and other data, I suspect we’re mired in a recession, and I think we should all be preparing ourselves for a massive disruption and crash.
People who live around me seem to be carrying on as if nothing happened. They’re still piling on debt, throwing out things they could be fixing or saving, and generally acting as if the good times will never end. But I do live in Dallas, so that might have something to do with it.

Mickey Marzick in Akron, Ohio says:

Ohio has been impacted by the recession a bit more because of its former manufacturing base with unemployment [10%+] a bit higher than the national average. The more urban counties appear to have been hit harder than the rural ones even though the numbers in the latter have always been suspect, underestimating unemployment there. It’s difficult to gauge the size of “underground economy” in either even though it must be significant because people appear to be scraping by with no visible means of support. Begging for food and/or money with signs on heavily travelled streets is common – the new normal!

Especially hard hit have been the public services in local and state governments. Layoffs [40 police officers in Akron pending], furloughs, reduced benefits and working hours, consolidation of municipal bodies with county ones elswhere have excerbated unemployment in the private sector. My youngest sister, a registered dietitian, is slated for about a 18% pay cut as her employment with the city will be terminated and then rehired by the county. [All this union busting and austerity meted out by "Democrats" who control the administrations in both!]

And the management consultants are still circling … with additional downsizing said to be imminent where I work and elsewhere.

Kasich [Gubernatorial] and Portman [Senate] will have to be found naked in bed together – they already are – to lose their respective elections. Even then… Most Democrats don’t have a chance… Ineptitude in Washington [White House and Congress], corruption at county and local government levels long controlled by Democrats have created the perfect storm. For too long the Democrats have paraded themselves as the champions of the “little people” while doing nothing really different to distinguish themselves from pro-business, less government Republicans. Even the latter seem to understand that JOBS are the issue and have “appropriated” this issue from their opponents. While their solutions are a rerun of past bromides/promises the Democrats have nothing better to offer.

That may be the real import of this recession. It’s over all right – for Democrats!

parheel says:

When folks are trapped in homes they can’t sell to take a job they want elsewhere the country has not “recovered”.

I live in NC. My daughter with her masters is in her 4th year of teaching and still making second year money despite a contract.

My son has graduated with honors in construction management. Luckily we started an odd jobs business with him a few years ago that is doing OK in this economy so he can get by. We are also getting into energy efficiency and analysis to save folks money and that is starting to pay off.

My business has been off by 50% for two years now. My wife is a pharmacist so we do OK. We support her family in Cuba who would starve otherwise.

We have always lived within our means.

We are living a new normal. I know enough economics and stay current enough to know the stock market is a con. That no one is focused on growth and that is the only way out of this. Our elites sold our economy to the chinese and oil barons to make themselves rich and our middle class poor. We are probably a decade away minimum from 5-7% unemployment.

And the sad thing is both parties are lying and people gobble it up like apple pie. We need truth tellers in the worse way.

David Jeremiah says:

To answer the question we have to ask is it the Real Economy or the Financial Economy in Reference. We have insidiously grown into an artificial economy which only works under certain conditions like a car. If you operate your Mercedes in Somalia unprotected, it will be stolen.

That is what I mean by artificial economy – you cannot operate it safely when the world around you are poor, unemployed and starving even if it is workable. So to answer the question: we are in Stagflation for many years to come – generally speaking. Don’t watch the TV, live your clam-shell lifestyle and check if your net worth is increasing or decreasing on a quarterly basis.

This will be most challenging especially for those between 20 to 40 years. A change in values may be necessary.

poopyjim says:

Here in the Washington D.C./metro area, if you don’t look below the surface it might not feel like a recession/depression. It’s a big fantasy world here. Almost everyone I know here works for the government or a government contractor. I’m lucky to be working for the government so I’m not worried about losing my job. However, I know that if things keep going the way they are going I’ll probably never be able to leave for the private sector though I would like to do so. Hard to voluntarily leave a job that pays well and where you can’t be fired in this environment.

John L says:

I work for NC state government, and have had zero pay increases in the last 3 years. Our work load has plummeted from lack of highway construction money; I used to let 4-10 projects a year; in 2010 I will let 2. My wife works part time for a small private engineering firm that is struggling to find work; they have some city engineering contracts but there’s little to no private development taking place in central/eastern NC. Projects created by the stimulus money are finishing up and there’s been no “kickstarting” of the economy from that money.

One of my neighbors works doing custom electrical work for big homes; he says work is slow. Another one is a private surveyor; he too says work is slow, but steady. There are several abandoned homes in my middle income neighborhood, and another neighbor has been out of work for over six months. Everyone seems to be digging in and waiting for the worst to hit; no one thinks things are going to get better soon.

My wife and I have funds set aside and have paid off all our debt but the mortgage, so we’re ok if she gets laid off. Fortunately my health insurance is covering my prostate cancer surgery, and I’ve got sufficient sick leave as well.

ep3 says:

lansing michigan. i am a CPA at a small firm.

all small businesses. sales over the summer down 10-20% in restaurants. retail clothing was down 28% in august; which i talked to their vendors who reported to me the same thing across the board. lansing experienced a smaller version of detroit’s white flight. all the surrounding “suburbs” of lansing are very nice and appear to be growing. but most of their growth is from businesses leaving lansing and moving to these surrounding areas and leaving lansing an abandoned foreclosed trash can.
we had some stimulus that rebuilt some road projects over the last two years (mostly projects outside of inner city lansing). in 1980, we had 30,000 GM workers; now lansing has 3,000 which another 3,000 work just outside lansing as GM was given millions in tax breaks. Oh and the factory, instead of replacing 100 year old buildings, was built on a fresh piece of farmland.

Moopheus says:

I got a new job with good bennies a few months ago, so my personal economy has stabilized significantly. Locally, things seem mixed: when we are out, there is activity at stores, restaurants, etc., but it still seems a bit slower than normal. Where I work, business is better than last year, but not great, and it’s publishing, which has been in recession for at least 30 years.

Leviathan says:

Three groups in my acquaintance seem to be coming out of this nearly whole: state and federal workers (in SOME states, clearly not all), retirees, and the investor class. Groups two and three overlap quite a bit, naturally.

Those outside major cities are faring better than those in the big metros.

A friend who works for NY State has received steady raises and her hubbie retired in his late 50s with a sweet buyout and pension. Few foreclosures, it seems, in Albany. DC, sad to say, remains a boomtown full of people who do not understand the pain everyone else is enduring. No justice there.

Generationally, the breakdown is weird. People in their 20s are depressed and in limbo. Working part time, bogged down with debt, not sure where to go or what to do. Thirty-somethings are clear winners in this economy: renting or in starter homes (whose values are recovering), too far down the ladder to have been sacked. Forty-somethings are in a tailspin. We bought our “move-up/forever” houses just before or during the bubble; we lost jobs because we made too much to be ignored but not enough to ride out the storm. Many fifty-somethings in the same boat, but more of them got burned by HELOCs taken out to renovate their homes or send kids to college. Sixty and up, well these folks lost a lot at first in the market crash, but have since recouped a fair amount. If they kept their debt burden low in the boom years, they seem mostly fine. But they are worried about the future and giving much less to their children. Estate lawyers will have a field day in a few years time.

Dave of Maryland says:

I’m in mail order, I sell specialized books for a living (astrology). Not to toot horns, but astrologers saw the mess coming at least seven or eight years ago, though I don’t think we realized how hard it would hit us as individuals. About 40% of my biz is international, almost none of it local. Unlike a lot of US booksellers, I ship everywhere. I’m a pro.

My belief was that when the US economy tanked, other countries would avoid getting sucked in with us. If the dollar then collapsed in value (hah!) the result would be a surge in overseas orders. My worst fear was that wholesalers would go bust, which would strand stores like mine. So far, no.

But the dollar did not tank and the rest of the world got sucked in, too. This biz stopped being “sweet” about three years ago. Two years ago it became nail-biting – just barely making ends meet.

This past summer, the bottom fell out. We now gross about 40% of what we did four years ago. Not enough to cover expenses now matter how hard we try. Downright frightening.

Three years ago I started a monthly newsletter to see if I could scare up sales. Didn’t much work, but it did give me a reason to come home at night. Eighteen months ago I took it weekly. Still didn’t have much impact on sales, but, like a lot of bloggers, I developed a following.

So, a week ago I bit the bullet & said, HELP!!! Much to my astonishment, sales last week were triple what they were the week before, and there’s a lot of overhang for this week. I’m not so silly to think this will go on, but my experience suggests there is a lot of money out there, if we can only shake it loose.

DKS, a semi-famous friend of mine, called last night. She thanked me profusely for sending her a client a month ago. One client! She says everybody she knows is on food stamps. (She was staring at her quarterly tax returns.) Since you asked, the astrological forecast for the economy, going forward, is grim, out to at least 2020, though Steven, in Pagosa Springs, says it won’t get really bad again until next year sometime.

And that’s what it looks like for a mom & pop mail-order biz in NE Maryland.

tyaresun says:

The current indicators that the Fed and the rest of the ruling elite focus on are a complete sham.

Please take a look at the link below for better measures:
http://www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/en/index.htm

A change in economic measures should be part and parcel of what needs to happen.

Fair Economist says:

Depression. Absolutely. I have 3 friends, in their 40′s and 50′s, who have been laid off from good white-collar jobs with no good prospects. They are all facing the possibility of forced early retirement to catfood lifestyles, after 2 decades as upper middle class. Their jobs are gone – outsourced abroad or swallowed up by managerial capture.

My husband’s long-term prospects aren’t looking good either. His company is getting both – the new management gleefully outsourced manufacturing to get bonuses for cutting wages, and to hire cronies for a blizzard of new middle management positions. They fired the entire manufacturing division, except for a small rump for work legally required to be in the US. Then they found out there’s a critical piece of custom machinery in the now-idled US facility – and the people who know how to build a replacement are fired or even previously retired. Oops.

koshem Bos says:

My job is safe and even if the institution disappears,I can 1retire comfortably. The Washington DC area is only marginally affected by the great recession. People walk the Malls with a bag in each hand; they buy a lot still.

Older workers, above 40, who make more money are layed off and younger people, typically out of college, are replacing them. Managers think that the only knowledge needed in management knowledge.

lambert strether says:

Depression, but then I’m up in central Maine, where the joke is “We’ve always been depressed!” It’s an extractive economy, forests and the sea, but the mills are all gone now, and as industries they’re being replaced by landfills (which will ruin our groundwater) and wind farms (which will, no doubt, be sold to municipalities for a dollar when their tax breaks expire).

So if recession is when your neighbor loses their job, and a depression is when you lose yours, this is a depression. I get by combining income from blogging (yes, one of the lucky few) with rental from the house. Of course, I’m going naked, so if I have any significant illness I’ll get smashed like a mayfly.

Like most of the others, I don’t see this changing, except for the worse. This is the new normal. Don’t get me wrong, I’m doing very interesting work, and there are times I’ve been happier than I ever was in corporate life, but I’m resigned to the idea that whoever’s running the show here would rather that I and those like me die off as rapidly as possible, and have carefully created the conditions for our average lifespan to start dropping, just as in the collapse of the USSR. There’s really no other way to read the policy decisions taken than that.

So, best of times, worst of times.

Hillary says:

I’m nervous, but just nervous. I finished my MBA in December 2008, after an internship with a company in the middle of a merger so no offer. I started a contract in Feb. 2009 that just ended, and I’m now looking for the next position. (I do supply chain and international compliance in MN, just in case anyone’s looking :-) I know I can meet my expenses for a while.

I’m networking, working with a couple agencies, applying to jobs and studying. I’m improving my database skills and prepping to take the Customs Broker exam in April. I’ll probably start taking a community ed Mandarin class in January.

Industrial and manufacturing companies around here are starting to hire again after layoffs last year. Anecdotally, companies are starting to invest in capital equipment and spend cash again.

James Moore says:

Someone else posted from Seattle:

“Washington has laid off thousands of teachers and state & local gov’t workers, and, unless you’re a 25 year old with a comp sci / math masters, the job market is dead – in my not humble opinion.”

I’m in my 40s in Seattle, not 25, but for software development, things are booming, particularly in the mobile space. I’m turning away work. Yesterday heard an ad on the radio; Marchex was sponsoring an NPR radio show because they had twenty openings to fill.

But I think this is a good illustration of our problems. The things I know about are really good jobs, definitely > $100k, lots of perks, and interesting work. But there are just tiny numbers of great positions for an even smaller number of people who can do them. I don’t think things are good for your average DBA type working for a small business.

Psychoanalystus says:

Personally, I have been doing just fine during this recession. I managed to sell all my US properties by 2007, and although the house in Greece likely went down in value, I don’t really care, since last year we converted part of it into a new dental office for my wife. And that dental office is going great, with her seeing on average 10 – 12 patients a day, which is a lot more than what most other dentists in town get through their doors. Plus, since that’s Greece, most of it is cash business…

Just a month ago I found a job at a VA in California, so we’ll be in the US for about a year now. And we’ll rent here, by the way. After that we’ll likely return to Europe for good.

So, we have a positive cash flow, we don’t have any debts, and no properties to lose money on. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that my gold investment has almost doubled in value in recent years.

So I have little to complain about. My rants around here are motivated more by self-amusement and by my dislike of seeing injustice (of which there’s plenty to go around in this country).

Psychoanalystus

S.D. Jeffries says:

From San Antonio, TX
Twelve years ago two friends and I bought a three-acre lot in far northwest Bexar county, the county San Antonio is in, because we wanted to get away from the hustle and noise of the city. There were already three houses on the property serviced by city electricity, septic tanks, propane tanks and a well. Over the next years the city grew up around us, and three years ago we decided to sell the property and go our separate ways. I had already bought a five-acre lot in the opposite direction from the growth of the city to build my dream/retirement home when we sold the three-acre property.

We’re still all living on the three-acre property, and it’s been for sale all this time. We must sell it as commercial property, as it’s in the city’s extra territorial jurisdiction and will be zoned commercial when the city annexes this area (the city wants the tax money from all the surrounding development), even though the property will be grandfathered-in as residential by the city as long as we live here.

My two “propertymates” work at a restaurant supply company and have not been downsized or part-timed, although they have not had a raise in two years and all bonuses have been stopped. Their company is not booming as in past years, but it hasn’t been hit hard by the recession, probably because it’s almost completely a cash business – the company carries fewer than two dozen credit accounts, and those only for long standing customers with multiple locations.

I am a small business owner, work from home and employ only independent contract workers. Five years ago I owned five franchise businesses. I decided to start selling them off in preparation for retirement, and sold three of them before the economic downturn hit. I parked the money in what I considered safe investments and decided to build up the other two franchises before selling them, meanwhile giving me a decent income.

San Antonio (metropolitan area population approx. 2.1 million) has not been hit as hard by the recession as other areas of the country. Currently unemployment is a little over 8%; housing prices have dropped some but not precipitously and the residential real estate market has not been flooded with foreclosures. We had 16,126 foreclosures in 2009 (largest number in two decades), and the number is running 6% less this year. A 2000sf home in a middle-class suburb can be had for about $150,000, although a larger lot and fancy amenities can double that price.

Food prices have increased only slightly (we’re blessed with two growing seasons each year and a plethora of farmer’s markets). Energy prices are relatively stable: our electric company is publicly owned and enjoys some of the lowest rates in the country. Strangely, gasoline prices have been stable or falling since June (currently $2.65/gal). Commercial real estate has been at a standstill for three years, but lately commercial foreclosures have begun rising, mainly retail space in large shopping areas and strip centers.

San Antonio has made good use of their portion of the state’s cut of the federal stimulus (once the governor got his head out of his ass and accepted the money); lots of roadwork, parks upgrades and expansion of common areas. The road in front of our property is being upgraded from a sleepy strip of farm road to a 5-lane throughway with curbs and sidewalks, scheduled to be completed in the next year or so.

My propertymates and I had a “business meeting” at dinner one Saturday evening about two years ago(we have dinner together every Saturday evening; sometimes friends come over to have dinner with us too), and decided that we should all just hunker down, pay off our debt and resign ourselves to staying here until the roadwork was done and the commercial property market picked back up. We are now all debt-free except for the mortgage on the place – one person has three months left on a car loan – and we’re just hoping no large expenses crop up (problems with the well or septic tanks). We’re also hoping the city doesn’t annex us any time soon, which would make for a substantial rise in property tax.

All of us who live on this property were reared by parents who lived through the depression, and we were all taught at an early age to avoid debt and live within our means. We have all run into financial problems of our own making in years past that impressed on us quite cruelly that our parents’ advice was spot on (it’s sometimes difficult to admit your parents were right), and none of us has repeated those mistakes. That’s the key I think: don’t live in debt, even though it’s tempting, and when it’s unavoidable, pay it off as soon as possible.

traderjoe says:

I believe we are on the cusp of a major economic crisis, perhaps even a complete collapse of the fiat currency. All fiat currencies throughout history have failed, eventually through devaluations and unmanageable political promises.

Our unfunded entitlements cannot be met across private, muni, federal levels. Every sector of the economy is swimming in debt. The muni crisis is in full swing.

The fractional reserve system is mathematically doomed to collapse at some point (it depends upon growth in order to pay interest and return principal). Expecting economies to grow forever is an assault on physics and real science (how systems cannot grow to infinity).

In the Depression, most people lived on farms. Now we have a disjointed urban society built upon the assumption that everything runs smoothly. Look at New Orleans during Katrina. That’s what we have coming. I have food, water, etc. ready for the SHTF moment. How many days before the grocery stores are empty/looted?

I believe we’ll come out on the other side. Either with a central planning facist system, or a de-centralized freedom-based society. I hope for the latter.

Joseppi says:

Here in the islands of trade winds and falling coconuts, falling wages, falling real estate prices, and cinched up hula skirts life due to high food and energy costs, the natives seem not as restless as mainland natives.
As long as Senator Inouye keeps military contracts and Fed largesse flowing this way, the tourists keep trickling into the hotels to maintain skeleton crews, and retiree savings are being spent on lawn mowing and other services – Life here will muddle along with Aloha until the Chinese come to redeem their US Treasury investments and buy everything available.

Student says:

21 year old student in the Bay Area currently getting a masters in Biocomputation at Stanford. Getting a masters in Biocomp. was somewhat of a hedge against my undergrad software skills, which are all too likely to get outsourced/replaced with younger talent when I’m 40. Thankfully, I have zero loans/debt as I was able to finance my education completely through financial aid and fellowships. In fact, I will probably graduate with $30k in savings. Live frugally for the most part but do spend money on good, healthy food and travel (figure I might as well do it while I have the time and money).

I still get regular recruiting emails from tech. companies so not exactly a recession for me personally but I think it’s a bleak future. In the field of software, the writing regarding outsourcing has been on the wall for a while and the ease with which an older programmer can be replaced for one who’s younger, cheaper, and almost as good is not comforting. Besides, as a senior technical engineer your salary is probably going to flatten out at around $150k-$200k and that’s by the time you get to 35 or so and if you’re lucky. Now I don’t care to have kids (people say I’ll change my mind; we’ll see), but for someone who did, $150k a year is not enough to support a family of four in the Bay Area once you factor in the mortgage, kids’ school expenses and college savings, 2 or 3 cars, retirement accounts and what not. As a result, the second parent typically ends up working too. Now maybe I’m old fashioned, but I hate the idea of having both parents working and the kids being brought up in day care centers. Recession or no recession, the idea that both parents have to have jobs to support their kids, that one of them can’t voluntarily quit to spend time with their kids does not equal to a good life in my mind.

So, my options are to get lucky and somehow strike it rich as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, to work in tech as a software engineer or to work my way up the business/management ladder. Fortunately, my education and location do give me a lot of flexibility in what I can do. The entrepreneurial option is appealing, but I find the solid ideas (from a business perspective) these days require extensive domain knowledge unless you’re willing to take a huge risk on a ‘business’ like Twitter. I think there’s still a bubble in the startup/VC world with too many social networking/Web 2.0 companies getting funding that don’t have any viable business model. I predict over the next 5 years a lot of these will fail. (I won’t look for an improvement in VC returns over the next 5 years, at least not in the US. A lot of VCs these days seem to follow what Buffett would call the greater fool paradigm of investing.)

Now that’s not to say that there still aren’t many opportunities in my field; there are many but they tend to be in things like enterprise software, virtualization, etc. which need a lot more domain knowledge than some young kids writing up a website in PHP/MySQL. Consequently, the startup, if and when I do one, will come later in the career. Leaves me with the software route or the business route. The points against software I’ve outlined above. My main beef with the usual software companies (MS, Google, Apple, etc.) is that they seem to have really weak programs/career paths for fostering business talent in people with technical knowledge (I’d like to think of myself as an engineer who is also business savvy). Moreover, people with strategic thinking seem to be a rarity in the software world for the most part, and I say this having interacted with computer science graduates from Stanford that then go on to pursue careers at the large SW companies. So, at the end, as much as I’m inclined against the business/management route (for multiple reasons; but to summarize, it’s a lot of generalist bullshit jazzed up with Powerpoint slides and weak numbers and faulty Excel models), I think it is the safest long term career option both from an economic (in that I’ll probably be able to retire comfortably) and professional standpoint (in that I will, hopefully, have my pick of industry and will be able to develop business skills for when I need them later in my career). Now, I happen to find myself in the somewhat enviable position of having interned at one of the top 3 consulting firms and having a full-time offer outstanding, so that makes it even more seductive. Having initially deferred my decision, I am now seriously reconsidering based on how weak the economy looks (I’m predicting a lost decade, FWIW).

I also run a small mail order music business part-time in high-end discs, and sales have been significantly down. Most customers (in the US and UK) complain of hard times and product that would have sold at 1.5x the price two years ago is still sitting with me.

To summarize, no recession for me personally. Though I haven’t looked for a job in over a year now, I think I could probably have my pick if I wanted. That said, the future looks positively scary. Especially for the middle class. FWIW, I’m not a US citizen, and in some ways, the smartest thing to do would be to go home or work somewhere in Europe or the UK, but I like this country too much. Oh well.

Apologies for going on and on. Slow day at work.

Ed says:

Muddling along. I have a job that is fairly secure, although there has been a salary freeze for some time, and our health insurance premiums have increased. I rent, but in a rent stablized apartment.

I live in New York City, though, and its amazing how costs have been going up. With a rent stabilized apartment, I’m somewhat insulated from the real estate costs -the property bubble still seems to be going strong here- but still have to deal with the increased subway costs and the costs of lots of incidentals going up. I’ve also noticed more beggars, but also more high end places that obviously cater to wealthy people opening. Also storekeepers and restauranters being somewhat trickier in what things really costs, trying to cage a little extra from their customers, or in the case of restaurants cutting the quality of their food.

I got hit with some big health care expenses last year, and have a wedding coming up, so I will have to cut back spending or I will see my savings vanish. I’ve noticed there are no good places to invest, so any unusual expenses mean cutting into the principal. I’m not sure where to cut, I may have to start staying in the office for lunch and I would prefer to have an excuse to get outside sometimes during the day. Maybe I should take up smoking.

Medicine Crow says:

Our income has declined 40% over the past eight years. The prices we pay for food, energy, taxes, insurance, tv and internet, which is the bulk of our purchases have increased by 10-50% per year. We live in the St. Louis metro area in Illinois.

Many of the folks we know are experiencing real difficulties: threatened with unemployment or taking cuts in pay with longer hours or higher pressure to produce, unemployed with little to be optimistic about.

No the recession isn’t over it is being continually reinforced by government policies which favor the wealthy and corporations. Saying Obama is anti-business in one of the GREAT lies. We are losing jobs in the vast majority of months and we know we have to create these every month just to break even for the people entering the job market for the first time.

I do think it skews results toward the positive end when the question is asked of those with internet, computer, and reading this blog. My guess is we readers are better off than a huge chunk of Americans.

Crosby says:

I work for a NYC real estate developer. The rental business has been strong for the last year. But mainly this is due to people not wanting to buy. The sales market is weak. On a personal level, my total compensation is down 20% in the last two years. My wife is a VP in a major company. She was given a small increase in pay last year but her bonus was 50% less.

eric anderson says:

I’m in central Iowa. Honestly, I don’t get out that much, being disabled. But I see the shops here hanging on, a few closings, but mostly stasis. The strip malls have been overbuilt, so there are many empty stalls that will probably not be filled for a long time.

A good friend has been out of work or underemployed for going on 18 months. I wish I thought it would get better for him, but I don’t. He and his wife just had a child. Thankfully the wife has an income, plus whatever part time work he can pick up.

Personally, I was in cash before the market crash, and my home, which I own free and clear, has not changed much in value. So my net worth was not hurt. But how to generate any income? This is a problem. With rising taxes and minimal returns on savings, we are not going to be stimulating the economy for a while.

PQS says:

PS – I love this blog and the commenters here. It is my first stop most days while surfing around.