Out of Chicken

I ran across this video today and just had to post about it. Apparently Popeye's, the popular fast food chicken outlet, had advertised heavily about a $4.99 special. People were disappointed to arrive and find many stores had completely run out of food!

CLICK HERE to watch a brief 2 minute video of what customers had to say about this, and note the customers... Every one is in a nice car, some wear suits and ties, many have cell phones, which they were using to call and find other Popeye stores in the vicinity...and they need a $4.99 special on Popeye's chicken to stay fed! Some even stated they had "looked forward" to the sale event for weeks, and others that they needed it to keep their family and children fed. Still thinking we have unlimited resources at our disposal, one customer complained: "They should have had a tractor trailer here with chicken on ice." The thought that the owners of the franchise simply couldn't afford to do that does not seem to have registered.

     Draw your own conclusions from this...I'll draw mine. The apparent normalcy of our lives is but a thin shell. Many still have their cars, clothes, and cell phones because they bought them when times were good. But beneath this shell of normalcy the egg has been gutted. Money is tight. People have lost access to credit and can no longer spend. Equity has evaporated, and anyone well off enough to have a 401k or "portfolio" is worried about it, particularly since the government is now considering a plan to change those funds to an annuity so they can draw on your nest egg to help fund the enormous debt they've been running up, which will complete the massive theft of private money that has been underway the last year.( That's right, your 401ks and IRAs are about to help pay for the bailouts. )  In short, no level of our society is unaffected by the economic crisis we have been living through. But the need for a $4.99 special to stay fed is a telling sign of things to come in this country.

     As a nation we are simply "out of chicken" just now, and the blue light special is a bust. All we have for consolation are the last few words on the sign posted at the drive through window: "Sorry for the inconvenience."

9 Days Falling Update

Scene 5 - Stormfront

This scene introduces Ben Flack, supervisor on an oil drilling platform in the Niger Delta, and starts what will become a major plot line for the story. Nigeria has been a slowly boiling kettle for years now, with rising social unrest and wide scale scavenging and looting of oil industry assets there. Security is thin, and local militias, angry at Western oil companies stripping off the wealth of the land while the people live in poverty, have been organizing stronger and more violent episodes of resistance in recent years. Added to ethnic and religious tensions in the hinterland of the country, Nigeria is fast becoming a lawless region and a major potential flash point for a conflict involving major powers.

    Of course, outside interests only concern themselves with oil. Little news of the region ever filters through the pop ridden seive of the U.S. media. But when anything happens to upset the fragile balance of supply and demand on the world oil markets, a crisis can emerge like a rapidly building storm front.

Scene 5 Direct Link Here
9 Days Falling Project Intro Page here

9 Days Falling - Scene 3 and 4 Now Posted

The sharp contrast of lives in the developed and undeveloped worlds continues through these latest scenes, as I set the background for important thematic elements in the story and kindle plot lines that will develop in the chapters ahead.

   In scene 3, "The Gober Men" we see the violence in lawless provinces of Nigeria start to spread. A look at today's headlines from the city of Jus in Nigeria should be instructive as to how easily violence can escalate in this region. The important thing about it, from a western perspective, is not the fate of people like Kuba, but the fate of the operations of men like Ben Flack, who will be introduced as a main character this weekend in scene 5. The Niger Delta is a major oil producing region in a world of increasing energy adversity. Kuba's fate is representative of the lives on countless millions, but the West seldom takes notice of them unless something threatens its own "interests." In this case, and in real life, the great threat to Western interests in Nigeria is the fragile state of the oil recovery business there in a setting of increasing civil strife. 

   But for now, enjoy these background scenes, one setting the stage for future story events in Nigeria and another reprising the character Robert from scene 2 as he muses about the late great financial system and the collapse we have recently lived through. 

The link to the main 9 Days Falling project page is here


Here are the latest scene releases:
Scene 3 Gober Men
Scene 4 Bad Weather

A New Direction

As 2010 dawns I have decided to take a new direction with the content presented on the Writing Shop main web site, for a number of reasons, some personal and some related to new business opportunities I will be exploring this year. For the last several years I have faithfully used this publishing place to present my thoughts, observations, predictions, ideas and criticisms of crucial events. In recent years this coverage has been dominated by articles ruminating on the inevitable consequences of our economic schemes, and commenting on the enormous bailout engineered to rescue the bad investment deals concocted by the wealthy banking sector. But in reviewing the numerous articles I wrote on the subject the last several years, I have concluded that there is really very little more to say. I have already said it five times over. So I’m just not going to write about these issues any longer—at least not in biweekly articles threaded by weekly blog posts on the subject. Enough said.
    Instead I am going to begin presenting more creative fiction here at the Writing Shop, and also invite contributions from the reading audience. To let those down easy who have come to enjoy my regular rants, the subject matter of the first fiction release is much akin to the topics discussed in the main article index. 9 Days Falling is a fictional look at the road we have been walking on these last several years, and where I think it will inevitably lead. I hope it will educate as much as it strives to also entertain, and I offer it in serial release free of any charge, as all content at this site has always been presented as a free service to readers.

   In closing I would like to thank all the thousands of readers, 50,000 or more, who visit my site to read my monthly articles. I hope you learned something, or at least were moved to deeply consider the implications of the things I was writing about. And I hope you will join me as I roll out 9 Days Falling in the months ahead.

   The key question in all of this remains to each of us: how can we retain our humanity and build that new world ahead as we pass through this time of crisis and forced change? We will each answer it in different ways, some with courage, ingenuity, assertive innovation, and deep compassion, others with vile thievery and continued selfishness. But no one in this generation will be able to remain indifferent. Like the people in Cormac MacCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road, we must either be the bad guys on the road of life, or the good guys, and carry the fire. We all must choose, one road or another.

   I have tried to carry the fire all these years with the only weapon I had to bring to the fight--the power of the pen. Many thanks to all the thousands of readers who have spent valuable time reading my articles. Knowing you were out there was one great motivation that kept me writing, and I hope you will join me on this next turn in the road as I  present 9 Days Falling.  Just click on the chapter links to read any given scene. The story will update each week with new scenes. So come back often!
    You can read about this project here, and to get things started, the first two scenes are on-line now. Taken in tandem they portray a glimpse of the vast difference in life style between the developed and undeveloped world. Half of humanity lives in utter squalor, while the other half indulges in trivial materialism to such an extreme that the very avarice of the wealthy power centers there have triggered the onset of a cascading collapse. 
   This is a novel of that crisis, as it has unfolded to date and as it may unfold in the days ahead. It is the time we live in now, and the choices we make in facing it will be the history written about tomorrow. 


May we choose wisely.

John Schettler

Who Owns The Debt?

Back after a long and well deserved vacation, which I will write about in a longer article soon. In the meantime, I return to my regular commentary on current events with this post about the massive debt being carried by all the world's nations...My question: Who do they owe all this money to?

News about the debt problems of Dubai, Greece, Spain and so many other countries prompted me to look up the debt situation in the world this morning. Wikipedia was quick to provide the answer with a nice table showing the indebtedness of all nations and listing debt as a percentage of their GDP.

It was no surprise to learn that the U.S. was the world's greatest debtor, with over $13.7 trillion owed. (95% of our GDP). The UK was in second place owing $12.6 trillion, a staggering 374% of their annual GDP! The list went on and on...Germany, France, Spain...the Western nations simply awash in debt. But India and China, where most people live, only had a combined debt of half a trillion, just a tad over 5% of their respective GDPs. The only nations who were not in debt were tiny states: Brunei, Leichtenstein and Macau, where neither country reported any outstanding national debt or budget deficit.

So all this begs the question in the title of this post: If the whole world is carrying these massive amounts of debt, with huge budget deficits to boot, to whom is all this money owed? The answer: they owe the money to each other! (The U.S. borrows billions each day, from states like China and Japan. But how did China and Japan get themselves into debt then? Again the answer is simple: Banks, and the whole system of fictional money creation we call "banking."

Loans, you see, are not made with real money that banks take from their vaults, money held there in safekeeping from all your deposits. When a loan is made the bank simply creates the money, and the debt, by keystroke on a computer. They have created loans and debt that exceed their actual deposit base by at least ten times.This is the sleight of hand magic trick now called "fractional reserve lending." It also means that all the money you presently think you have in your bank account simply isn't there--it was lent out long ago.

Since all these loans are made with an interest fee due, there is never really enough money in the system for them to ever be paid back. The banks create the loan money, but not the interest money. The net result of this shenanigans is what you will find on the national debt table in Wikipedia. Every nation owes money to someone else, but none reports a positive balance! Amazing! It's as if the entire debt burden of the world, and all the attendant misery it has caused, is simply nothing more than a shady gentlemen's agreement, nothing more than numbers in a computer...pixels.

So the odd thought occurred to me, strange as it may sound--why have this big economic crisis? Why don't we all just start over? Let's have a big meeting at the UN instead and simply declare that all debts, public and private, are hereby absolved. No one owes anyone anything. We all start fresh. Then we tell the banks that fractional reserve lending was fun while it lasted, but now it's over. We only allow them to lend actual deposits. The end.

The simple reason this will never happen is that the wealthy would not like it. Wealthy people are simply folks who have more money owed to them than most others. Repudiating debt would also erradicate their pixelated "wealth," so they would never want this to happen. The wealthy depend on debt, and debtors, to remain wealthy. End of story. And this is why we have the "system" we have...and why most people live hand to mouth in this world, largely impoverished, so the tiny fraction at the top can play with the balances in their spreadsheets.

We call this "The miracle of capitalism."

Voices from the Wilderness

As a follow up to yesterday's post, I thought I would share some brief quotes from a few of the blogs I read each morning, the voices crying from the wilderness out there in a gallant effort to present a real picture of what is happening. Here are minds that "get it" and say it well. Consider as you read this commentary how different it is from anything you will hear tonight on TV news...

Looking at how we got here, Jeff Nielson of Seeking Alpha comments:

"To be sure, there are many other contributing factors. Excessively low U.S. interest rates, the abolition of lending standards, and the abolition of regulation were also horrible mistakes. However, since all three of those previous mistakes were undertaken through orders from Wall Street, the real cause of the current, U.S. housing catastrophe was Wall Street's scheme to fleece the world out of trillions of dollars through marketing “toxic” mortgage products, and Ponzi-scheme derivatives – based upon the U.S. housing bubble."

My Budget 360 noted the strange disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street realities:

"It is a site to behold that the stock market is rallying since the March 2009 low even though we have officially lost an additional 2,700,000+ jobs since that time. That is right, the system is so upside down right now that somehow nearly 3 million jobs lost is worthy of a nearly 70 percent rally in the S&P 500. I sit back and can only watch amazed as the stock market is converted into a full-fledge casino for the corporatocracy while the real economy is still hemorrhaging from multiple financial wounds. We have lost over 7.2 million jobs officially (8 million once the February revision is put in) and yet the market keeps moving up. Why? Because the banking system is using every ill gotten penny to gamble in futures, derivatives, and every other financially toxic product while the average American continues to bailout their gambling ways."

Michael Panzner of Financial Armageddon weighed in on the debate about the efficacy of the so called "Recovery."

"For months now, there's been considerable debate about whether the U.S. economy is on the road to recovery. Bulls point to the massive monetary and fiscal stimulus that's been pumped into the economy, the sharp rebound in share prices, and the relative improvement in certain indicators as a reason for optimism. Bears -- like me -- note the persistent negative sentiment on Main Street and in many corporate boardrooms, the steady increase in foreclosures, personal bankruptcies, and the ranks of the long-term unemployed, and the numerous imbalances -- including still-very-high levels of public and private debt -- that remain unresolved. So who's right? ...One way to get a sense of where things stand is to look at how things are playing out relative to the past. On that basis, the notion that the economy is back on track leaves a lot to be desired."

To illustrate his point he published 7 excellent charts showing that current employment, retail sales, housing starts, industrial production, durable good orders, consumer credit outstanding, and the relative value of the S&P 500 are all tracking well below every other recession since WWII. To view the charts click here.

Speculating on the future direction of oil and energy prices, The Business Insider suggested big money traders were getting ready for a spike:

"The total net long positions by large speculators showed record bets on energy prices. Crude prices have risen 17% over the last month and over 100% in the last year as big money has poured into oil as the dollar has weakened and the global economy has strengthened. Unlike small speculators, who lack the firepower to move prices and have generally been on the wrong side of trades the large speculators tend to be the market movers. This latest data shows a continued allocation into energy by large hedge funds and institutional traders." Link here

Jim Quinn's take on the market rally in his Daily Dose of Reality:

""I truly believe that back in March 2009 at the market lows, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and the criminal mega banks met and decided they were going to create a recovery by manipulating the stock market. The government gave these banks $700 billion of TARP funds and the Federal Reserve loaned them money at 0% and told them to have their traders buy the market. The mega-banks did so with gusto. All of the profits generated from these banks have come strictly from trading stocks. They will now take home hundreds of millions in bonuses for doing the bidding of the Federal Reserve with no risk of losing. They are losing money out the yazoo from mortgage lending, credit cards, and commercial lending. They have been able to generate a stock market rally of 60% using free money. The banks then issued hundreds of billions in new stock in order to improve their insolvent balance sheets. Who were the buyers of this new stock? It was the financial institutions who were told to buy it by the Federal Reserve using free money. Do you get it? This is a gigantic ponzi scheme fraud."

Chris Martenson commented on the absurdity of the Fed announcing its "earnings" of $45 billion last year:

"First of all, the word 'earnings' implies that value was created and/or something was at risk. Neither applies to the Fed. Let's review the process by which they 'earned' money in 2009. We'll simplify this by examining just one of their activities, the purchase of Treasury debt.

Step 1: Using keystrokes, create $300 billion out of thin air.
Step 2: Buy Treasury notes and bonds with the $300 billion.
Step 3: Collect interest from the US government on those notes and bonds.
Step 4: Report record 'earnings.'
Step 5: Wash, rinse, repeat.

What is the meaning of 'earnings' in that series of steps? What value was created? Where was the risk? In this context the word 'earnings' has no meaning or any relevance at all. It's the exact same thing as if the Fed had printed $49 billion dollars put them on the income statement and called them 'earnings.'"

And MISH Shedlock had these questions about the supposed Fed profits:

"Does that count the $185 billion the NY Fed crammed down taxpayers throats over AIG?
Does that count the real cost of any of its other inane off-balance-sheet recommendations approved by Congress at taxpayer expense? Does that include a marked-to-market accounting of Mortgage Backed Securities on its balance sheet?"

Karl Denninger noted that in spite of the cheery news about recovery, only 9% of Americans now think the economy is improving:

"Consumer confidence this week sustained one of its steepest one-week drops in the last quarter century, (-47) following last week's troubling jobs report with an all-hands retreat from what had been a tentative positive trend in consumer attitudes. There's no good news embedded in here. Personal finances and the buying climate dropped by amounts matching their largest one-week change ever, possibly spurred by people getting their credit-card statements from Christmas (or simply reflecting on what they spent - and determining it was too much. Only nine percent rate the economy positively."

See how the mysterious world of high finance goes merrily on with its $23.7 trillion dollar heist while a handful of bloggers consistently expose the fallacy of everything they do and say?

You want to know what's really going on? Read the blogs.

A Bodyguard of Lies

Winston Churchill had a lot to say about truth in his day. Any number of famous quotes derive from his opinion on that topic. "There are a lot of lies going around," he once said, "and half of them are true." And further he noted: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." And "in wartime," he said, "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."

The last few months some of the most respected minds in the blogosphere have labored to expose the lies that mask the truth about what has happened to the economy, and why. Forsaking mainstream media news, their own research has exposed a phalanx of lies and deception, from fudged employment numbers by the BLS, to clever accounting rules changes at the banks, to sly Fed programs to buy up treasuries and even secretly purchase stock futures to bolster and manipulate the market. Details of the TARP bailouts and other Fed programs remain hidden. The results of the AIG investigation are quietly to be sealed for 12 years. On and on it goes--one cover-up after another, one lie used to conceal another.

There is no question that some of the assertions made by bloggers like MISH, Karl Denninger, Charles Hugh Smith, Jim Quinn, Chris Martenson, Matt Tabbi, Ilargi, James Kunstler and so many others have their diligent minds around a nub of the truth. They have bravely challenged what might be called the prevailing wisdom of the mainstream media, which is really nothing more than an agenda serving the corporations who own the news shows. They have shown, statistically, that the so called "recovery" trumpeted by the mainstream is false.--nothing more than a concoction of government spending and well doctored reports. And over recent months more noted minds from academia have shown solidarity in voicing similar opinions. Pulitzer Prize winning economist Joseph Stilgitz recently noted the strange divergence of opinion between those talking up the market and the reality of the Main Street economy. Bill Gross, the managing director of Pimco, the world's largest bond fund, went so far as to call the whole economy a "Ponzi scheme."

Yet, in spite of their efforts at exposing lies and uncovering truth, much of the web discourse that gets such heated debate in the blogosphere remains largely unknown to the public at large. As influential as they might be, the blogs only command the attention of a small percentage of the population. Sadly, most people simply don't read. They don't read newspapers,or magazines in the mainstream media, and they certainly don't read the blogs. Instead of digesting news on what I consider to be the salient issues of our time, the great heist of public funds to bailout the wealthy, most people have little understanding of what has happened, and little interest in the subject. They much rather prefer to muse on who will be the next American Idol, or what will happen to Tiger Woods, or some other aspect of our ridiculous pop culture. And you will note that the opinions and general world view of those who read the blogs daily will differ sharply from those who do not.

Thus the whole effort of blogging on these serious economic topics out of some notion that the truth matters has become a kind of exercise in futility at times. Bloggers expose the lies, skewer them with charts, statistics, rational arguments. But the bottom line is that nothing really changes. The Bloggers are tilting at windmills. Their followers are really a small group of the intelligencia that is basically of like mind. In short, they are preaching to the choir. Bloggers call for prosecutions, investigations, audits, the abolition of the Fed. They want Geithner's head on a platter and would happily tar and feather Bernanke if they could. At the proverbial "end of the day," however, the powers that be, those who really control the money, do what they please. Let's face it: The Fed is not going to permit an audit, and it certainly won't be abolished. The "too big to fail" banks are not going to be broken up. Goldman Sachs will go merrily on with its predatory trading model. The BLS is not going to suddenly report real unemployment figures, and MSNBC and Fox are not going to report real news either. So why bother? I write 24 articles per year, (one every two weeks), and in recent years these have mainly been about the economy. Why bother? No one pays me a nickel for this work.

I suppose the bloggers continue to fight the good fight because their own intellect and character commands that they do this, and oppose the ubiquitous falsehood, fraud and deception out there. It was well said that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. One Blogger leads his daily soap box post with this quote: "As long as certain twisted souls feel the need to lie, cheat and murder to achieve their ends, some of us need to keep pointing it out." So, like well meaning agents, they aim to break through that bodyguard of lies and find the truth. Because in the end there is no version of the truth...it is not a matter of anyone's opinion. It is simply what is. Finding that truth is what blogging is all about for many, thankless job that it often is, and perhaps they take heart from one other thing Churchill said on the subject:

"Truth is incontrovertible, ignorance can deride it, panic may resent it, malice may destroy it, but there it is."

Make It So

The Government wants to present the appearance of an ongoing recovery so, in true Captain Picard fashion, they simply give the order: "Make it so." Today's employment report from the BLS is a typical example. Jobs contracted for the 24th consecutive month. The BLS admitted that we lost 85,000 jobs from payroll reports in December. But the news that never gets reported is that the actual labor force shrinkage was ten times that!

The numbers are there, right in the BLS tables themselves, but they are just quietly ignored. The "Civilian Labor Force" shrunk by another 661,000. These are workers who haven't met the strict guideline the BLS holds for being considered "unemployed." You have to be actively looking for work to be counted as unemployed by the BLS. If you get discouraged, and haven't put an application in in recent weeks, you are simply not counted as being out of a job any longer. You are therefore "dropped from the labor force." This is statistical delusion at best, statistical fraud at worst. The BLS is guilty of both.

Beyond this, the total of all people no longer counted in the labor force for December, (which includes all categories, not just civilian) came to 843,000. And Marketwatch reported: "The number of people who've been unemployed for longer than six months rose by 229,000 to 6.13 million, representing a record 39.8% of 15.3 million who are classified as unemployed." Requests for emergency unemployment assistance funds are skyrocketing. People are just not able to find productive employment.

So the headline U-3 unemployment number of 10% really just tracks what percent of the work force are out of a job AND actively seeking a new job by putting in applications. Add in the folks out of work who have given up looking and you get the U-6 number of 17.3% unemployed. Throw out the manipulated "birth / death" calculation where the BLS just estimates how many new jobs are created or lost, and you get the real unemployment number as we end 2009, a whopping 22.7%.

This unemployment curve is now the deepest of any post WWII recession. In fact, it is Depression era pain, and it arrived much sooner than in the 1930s. It took three years for the unemployment number to break 20% after the crash of 1929. We are now just 15 months beyond the crash of 2008.

Those familiar with statistical charting will easily see the real story of our unemployment picture in this excellent chart provided by Calculated Risk:


The red line is our current "Recession," and the remaining lines show all previous recessions. Note the recovery trajectories. Now mentally draw in the red line, assuming it makes a gradual approach to the mean of zero, where it was before the recession began. Job recovery to that level would take at least another 24 months, but to achieve that we have to add at least 100,000 new jobs per month. We are still losing jobs and shrinking the work force by droping unemployed people from the rolls to fudge that data.

This is not an Op Ed. It is not my "opinion." The statistics tell the tale in simple math. While we may be at the bottom of our current job loss cycle for this downturn, we are still very far from "recovery" to normal levels. But if you want to think otherwise you can join the ranks of Winston Smiths at the BLS and simply "Make It So." (I refer, of course, to the famous main character of Orwell's landmark novel 1984, who's job it was to rewrite news items so they accorded with current government views.) Me? I'd rather be an "unperson" and simply tell the truth.

The Challenges of 2010

In spite of all the hardships of 2009, and those likely to continue in 2010, I wish you all a "Happy New Year." Yet 2010 will be a year of many challenges for the nation and our struggling economy. The intelligentsia of the nation, voicing itself through the Blogs on the Internet, long ago put an end to the fallacious notion that we were experiencing a recovery in late 2009. Even though the stock markets rallied, they are now so divorced from realities of the Main Street economy that the DOW or S&P 500 are no longer even remote indicators of our true economic situation. While both the administration and the mainstream news media will continue to talk about recovery, the nation will struggle on trying to find some traction in an environment where no recovery is really possible. How long can the manipulations holding the market up continue? Methinks reality bites soon, and the indexes will head into a steady decline.

The GDP numbers pundits sometimes point to as evidence of "growth" largely rest on the massive government spending--in effect, on more unsustainable debt. When will it ever be paid back? And how long can the government continue to simply raise its debt ceiling to fund programs aimed at breathing life into the economy? It is clear that the government, which represents only 30% of total annual spending, cannot in itself take over responsibility for the whole economy.

So what exactly will we recover to, a return to housing speculation and credit based consumption? A continuation of the astronomical debt accumulation that now threatens to swamp every level of our society? Who in their right mind thinks housing is about to make a dramatic recovery and begin appreciating at 20% or 30% as it did in the early boom years? Who in their right mind thinks commercial real estate is healthy, growing and appreciating in value? Answer: no one. I have seen no credible analysis that indicates any sustained recovery is underway or even possible for residential or commercial real estate. All the present effort is still in "bailout mode" for the banks. They quietly remove the cap for funding the bankrupt Fannie and Freddie, opening the door to more massive losses in these two great mortgage landfills. Banks have been busy wrangling with mortgage alteration rules, lobbying against "cramdown" loan modifications, buying securities and derivatives in the dollar carry trade, reducing credit lines and raising interest on credit cards--not lending.

Then where will the recovery come from, business growth? At the moment, business is so strapped for credit that growth is largely off the table, particularly in the small business sector that often relies on their own revolving credit to sustain operations. Are banks about to suddenly open their vaults and lend to small business that have little collateral and dim prospects for sales in the difficult year ahead? Of course not. Banks will continue what they have been doing, borrowing from the Fed at 0.25% interest and then leveraging back into derivatives. And without a sudden, and rapid expansion in the main street business sector, where will new jobs come from? (The temporary government hiring for the 2010 census will evaporate by year's end. Every job they "create" that way will be short lived and soon destroyed. ) With real unemployment at 22% in this country, how can anyone believe that we can get back to earlier levels of "consumption" to drive up business sales? It's a vicious circle. No sales-No jobs. No jobs-No sales.

Is there a new breakthrough in technology that will suddenly lift the economy from its doldrums? I would love to think that we could have a boom involving alternative energy for both cars and housing, but I just don't see any development of sufficient scale to have an impact on the economy. Sure, the electric cars will hit the streets soon, but only for those who can afford them, or convince a bank to lend them the money to buy one.

Put all this together and ask yourself what we are recovering to? As James Kunstler said in his first post of the new year: "Whatever you thought our economy was the past thirty years -- whatever model of it you have in your head -- that is definitely not what we are going back to."

Consider what this means... particularly if you run a store that sells nick-nacks to tourists. 2010 will be a year where necessity becomes the primary taker of all our disposable dollars. Yet, one still must have hope in that this necessity may be the mother of invention. What will replace the old consumer credit society? Give that some thought for 2010.