toldja so
Question: fat, selfish, arrogant Americans react to losing almost everything. I think they will elect a Hitler type and try to solve all of their troubles by blaming the wurld and attempting to conquer it.
Answer: we don’t hitlarian leaders to conquer the world streaming Brittney Spears videos on broadband is sufficient I think you undesrstand the big picture like many of us
I suspect the same thing will happen. I see bankruptcies begining to start now and lots of people who owe 30k in student loans to get a skilled job in even medical fields and their begging for a good job with straight A transcripts… Stox, the doomers are insulating and putting up sheetrock. They’re canning and cutting wood, getting ready for a hard winter using their homespun skills.
The doom ‘n gloom lists have carried reports of butchering livestock; beef and pork going into the freezers.
The goal is to reduce expenses this winter.
I agree with you and piddie, the price of oil and basic commodities are up. Jobs are in short supply. Tech jobs are going to India. Manufacturing to China. Add in the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Critical thinking about the economy. Tech ain’t coming back. My Pentium II-400 ($99 last year at the used computer store) is plenty fast. China has juiced the old IBM Cyrix CPU to over 1,000 mHz.
The last cell fone was sold last month, now they’re just doing trade-ins; it’s not a growth industry.
Empty stands at the Olympics? Fear of terrorists or no one has the spare cash for a luxury vacation? Seems odd that folk can go to Sidney but not Athens. I’m guessing that it’s the economy.
Going forward from here, each month, the cost of energy will grind away at the sheeple. Ditto those who rent. Month by month, their expenses increase. Food is up too. Insurance, medicine, on and on.
The doom solution was to spend the last 4-5 years cutting living expenses. Fixing, repairing, building skillsets and saving money.
This doesn’t mean that the economy will collapse in an end-of-the world scenario. It does mean that mid-range doom predictions from 1998 and 1999 were spot on.
2nd running of the U.S. Great Depression; Japan-like longer than a decade economic doldrums; pre WWII Germany hyper inflation; take your pick.
You can ride these out. With a little luck and a lot of hard work, the doom-lists hope to prosper.
I’m told this story before. I worked with a fellow whose grandfather hit the 1st Great Depression with fifty thousand dollars in cash.
That fellow’s family remembers the 1930’s and 1940’s as the good years. They lived in the big house on the hill. Essentially they owned a small town. Had servants. Owned and managed the major businesses.
Granted, fifty grand was a lot of money in 1929 but it wasn’t THAT much. About what a million or two was like in 1999?
The question on the table on the doom and gloom lists is, what’s next?
Some guesses are that the Greenspan will raise interest rates and will CAUSE inflation in the near term by increasing the cost of doing business. As costs increase, goods and services will become more expensive.
Fuel costs will also drive up prices. This will reduce economic activity in discretionary areas, resorts, travel, hotels, airlines.
Home improvement, especially insulation, are growth industries. I’ve been working on my place evenings and weekends. Sheetrock, plywood, electrical, plumbing, insulation. Getting things fixed up.
If you put a twenty a week into a coffee can starting in 2000, you’d have over $4,000. That’s not retirement money. Taht’s “walking around money”. $4,000 in cash gives you options, a stake.
A mainframe programer might get a $400 used laptop, freeware CDs with Linux, Hercules/390, MVS 3.8, and bid on support or development work. That same machine could run Cloudscape (the opensource Java SQL database), MySQL, any of several free C++ compilers.
Plumbing and jackleg carpentry? A full kit of power tools is less than $2,000. Plumbing? A hacksaw and file for plastic, a $4.99 tubing cutter and a $9.99 propane torch for copper.
If you have your health and determination, there is nothing that you cannot do.
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