
U.S. Job Losses Signal Recession Will Be Long, Deep  - gibsonf1
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aniNd2kN.vdI&refer=worldwide
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noonespecial
I love it how they tell us that this recession is unlike any other in history
and then go ahead and tell us exactly how long it will last and just how bad
it will be.

Personally I think we've past the inflection point of predictability. Its
anybody's guess now.

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jaxn
“We don’t get the job losses stopping until 2010,”

That is the scary part. The way out of a recession is to get people working
and spending. So does that mean it is going to last until 2011?

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nostrademons
The "mood" after a recession tends to last until about 4-5 years after the
recession begins, assuming it's not a total bear market like the 30s or 70s
were (in which case, it tends to last at least a decade). People didn't really
feel like we were out of the 1979 oil shock and 81/82 recession until 1984.
(Some of my earliest memories are from about 1984, and I recall my parents
being _very_ careful with money.) They didn't feel like we were out of the
1991 recession until Netscape's IPO in 1995. They didn't feel like we were out
of the 2000 tech recession until FaceBook and YouTube hit it big in 2005.

So yeah, if you date this recession from late 2007, we've got until 2011 or
2012 before people really think we're out of it. And that's assuming there's
not a further shock, like an oil price spike, another recession (the 1937
recession hit right as people were starting to recover from 1929-1932, the
1979 oil shock hit just as people were recovering from the 73-74 recession),
or a war.

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dmix
I think we all need another top ten list about how to survive a recession when
your a startup. Anyone?

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ckinnan
At least the dotcom bubble produced world class companies like Amazon and eBay
and Google. The housing bubble leaves us with only foreign debt and
unproductive granite countertops.

~~~
nostrademons
And lots of houses.

I'm guessing some lucky entrepreneur will come up with a good use for all
those empty houses, once they've all been foreclosed upon and prices have
adjusted to reality.

I had an idea last year that I'd act upon if I had a spare $50M or so lying
around: mixed-use coworking/residential spaces for young professionals. The
increasing mobility of the professional class means that more and more people
aren't tied down to a central office. Why not create intentional communities
out of abandoned subdivisions, where young professionals could live and work
with other young people? I'd pay a premium for being able to roll out of bed
and walk to work, yet I don't like the brick & concrete of dense city
neighborhoods. Park a couple ZipCars in the development, and you solve their
transportation/shopping needs as well.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I live in an apartment building built in 2006 or so.

The heating system is undersized and uses the same hot water as the shower --
if you want a non-frigid shower, you have to remember to turn the heat off
first and turn it back on afterwards.

The doors don't fit quite right. Every single screen in every window is
undersized by 2 inches in one dimension. It's also really drafty, which may
explain why the original builder is replacing _every single window_ in the
300+-unit complex. (One wonders if a lawsuit happened somewhere in there.
Unfortunately, they did not get around to replacing _our_ windows before
winter set in, and did I mention that it was drafty? I need to get over to the
hardware store to buy plastic wrap for the windows. To think that I dreamed of
never having to do that again when we moved out of the 1920s-era house...)

My favorite feature is the built-in wine rack, which adds class to the
establishment until you try to fit a wine bottle in it. Which is physically
impossible, because it was misinstalled.

But I still feel lucky compared to my sister, who moved into a similar complex
in the Midwest where the builder had failed to build the exterior porches with
the proper slope, leading rainwater to collect against the walls at the inner
edge of the porches, leading to failure of the siding, water leakage, and the
exciting possibility of... total porch structural failure. Fortunately, my
sister moved out in less than a year.

These little incidents make me worry that a _lot_ of those leftover houses
will be slums. They were built terribly, in terribly planned neighborhoods, by
people with little past experience and even less future in the construction
field. What profit was there in building the houses to last? Nobody was
planning to live in them for very long. They're just tokens, built with less
care than a poker chip. They were built to flip.

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josefresco
I'm not worried... for every home owner who bought an overpriced home, is
another home owner who sold them that home.

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helveticaman
Long, Deep Recession? Isn't the proper name for this a Recession?

