For months now I have had this feeling that "something is not quite right", or "the numbers don't tell me what my eyes are telling me", etc...
Today it occurred to me that the problem was with the data on small and family owned businesses - like mine, my brother's biz, my sister's biz, the sandwich shop on Federal Highway, the Realtors over on Palmetto Park Rd, the Pizza Shop that closed on the corner...
I see it in the vacancy of shops and offices here in sunny South Florida, and I hear it on the phone in speaking with my clients and prospects around the country. Business sucks - and that's for the lucky ones still IN business. The big corporations obviously had lots of fat to cut, considering unemployment and the length of the work week, but the little family business was always run pretty lean - and it relied almost exclusively on the owner. Everyone else working there usually supported the owner in his efforts. The supporting cast is gone and the small business owner is just barely hanging on. Business creation? Dead as fried chicken.
And the U.S. equity market is making new highs at the same time that the Junk Bond default rate is well into double digits - and rising. It really pays to be big, connected, and to have gone to one of the establishment's favored schools.
So, what can the government do? State, Local, and Federal governments can cut their regulatory elements to the bone. Will they? NAFC. Our government HATES business, especially small business.
I wonder what my little town in Wilson County, Tennessee will be like in 5 years. There is no big company there to bring employment, tax revenue, etc... (with the exception of WalMart - I wonder if the local folks know just how much damage that WalMart did to their nice little 200- year-old-city. Their down-town was once a vibrant commercial district that has no been reduced to a bunch of antique shops with starving proprietors.) 20% of the county's residents are already receiving food assistance, yet they still have enough money to smoke (and state laws in much of the South, tobacco states, do not exactly encourage people to quit smoking... there seems no shortage of older folks walking around with Oxygen tanks), which kinda/sorta tells me what kind of cultural/educational system they have...
Not that what they do have is the kind of life you would want for your kid... endless muffler, oil change, car repair, Taco Bell and The Waffle House type businesses... and in any event, as I said before.... business sucks. Yet the young people I speak with who are working in these establishments are college educated and indebted, well the ones without the Prison Tattoos, that is.
But at least The Powers That Be have decided to abandon the US$ in order to bail out the big banks... So we got that going for us.
Real unemployment is over 17%, not 10.2%, the highest since the 1930's - yet consumer debt as percentage of GDP is the U.S. is the highest in the history of modern economics.
While I lack the proverbial crystal ball, I think it highly probable that something bigger than just another economic dislocation is in the offing.
Libertariananimal (at) gmail (d0t) com
