Everything is relative.
Take Boeing for example. A place I know well. Sure, Boeing is hiring. Are they hiring back the 40,000 jobs it lost in Washington after 9-11? No. And by the way, I wouldn't be expecting any major additional expansions or hiring sprees at the lazy B in the near future either as they are about to be hit just as hard as everyone else.
Remember, airplanes take gas, just like your car and airliners are paying double or triple what they were a few years ago, yet can't raise ticket prices....you do the math. Then there's the 787 problems, but that's another topic.
This economic cycle we just went through was largely superficial and debt based and its now starting to collasp under its own weight. We are in the very earliest stages of this recession and the reason things are happening relatively slow is because there is a major effort by government and private banking forces, including international central banks, to use every power within their means to stave off what I think they believe could end up being a major U.S. depression, if not world depression. But those efforts are not without a price. We're trading the value of our dollar, our savings, and the cost of critical commodities such a fuel and food, for little more than the "hope" that we can reignite the financial markets and continue to borrow our way through another economic cycle.
This economic up cycle is ending far differently than any other. The end of this cycle is not predominated by a stock market collasp or collasp of the consumer market or job market. Its predominated by a collasp of the financial markets. One cannot underestimate just how critical the financial markets have become to our national and world economies, which are now entirely debt driven and debt based. And that goes from our Federal government, which must borrow half of every dollar it spends right down the average working American stiff who canÆt even so much as buy a TV or a stereo or in many cases, even gas, without putting it on a credit card.
Take away credit and the entire economy comes to a screeching halt and no more so, than this economic cycle, which has been largely driven by a national and regional housing bubbles, which have fuel millions of jobs and pumped trillions of dollars into the economy, via new forms of debt and a massive consumer spending spree, which gave us the false impression that we completely recovered from the last economic cycle of 2001.
Now that all that is gone and there is no foreseeable recovery in the financial markets, its not hard to predict whatÆs going to happen to the rest of the economy. WeÆre already seeing the complete collapse of the housing market in regions where it boomed beyond reasonable values and the job market that it was based on. But those collapses are just beginning.
In these early stages, different areas could be affected differently. Texas, for example, along with much of the South is very anti-union and business friendly and has very low cost of living. They are very attractive to industrial and manufacturing businesses and many are relocating there. The job market could be fairly decent or at least stabilized there and low wage earners will find it easier living than other parts of the country for the foreseeable future.
By contrast, the housing market is very overvalued and set for a major collapse on the West Coast and industry and businesses are leaving, while taxes, which are already very high are likely to go higher to continue to support the many social programs and recent government subsidized overbuilding and over development in that region. The same could be said of the east coast.
The mid-west probably has it the worst of the entire country as they suffer the most immediate loss of industry and jobs. But its hard to say how they will be affected as this gets worse as they're already well into their own recession and are working through it. It will be less of shock to that region, compared to the west coast, which is full of over extended, but otherwise relatively well to do poeple who can't imagine recession, much less personal economic disaster.
But as this thing progresses, no one will probably be immune. Ironicly, I'm starting to consider that Texas and the south could be what California was in the 1930s. The place where all the remaining jobs are where everyone migrats too. And California, Oregon and Washington could be the Oklahoma of the 1930s. But that's getting a little ahead of things.
In the end, its hard to say exactly where we are headed. A common sense look at our economy clearly shows that we are anything but stable and secure and the economic numbers point to a looming total collasp of epic purportions at some point in our future. However, what appeared to be decades away is starting to rear its ugly head much sooner than expected.
