It seemed for a while that everything was smelling like roses when it came to the economic recovery that has been so hotly anticipated. Not all good news of course, but we had people like Ben Bernanke saying that there were signs of life showing, which to me was a breath of fresh air after all the other negative nellie news. However, there’s a huge difference between glimmers of life and the recovery that we really need right now.
My first thought when I hear pseudo positive news like this is “gee, we pumped billions of dollars in to these financial institutions with a huge recovery package, shouldn’t we be showing a little more than glimmers of hope from that?” Call me a total cynic, but I feel a little like sunshine is being blown up our collective you know whats. And I fear I may be right and a recover is much further down the road than once thought.
First of all, the company I work for, which is a Fortune 500 company which shall remain nameless, just had a RIF, or Reduction in Force again, and I keep hearing about more and more job losses, which take a long while to recover from in and of themselves, and second, the news just came out that consumer spending is not improving, which is another propeller to a healthy economy that quite frankly just isn’t happening right now.
Consumer spending is one of the key elements to get this economy moving again, and people are keeping their money in their pockets, which will do them good individually but of course will keep our economy stalled as well as our jobs in the minus zone. This means that consumer confidence is still no the brink, and that we need to get that back in order to get people spending. People are having their credit card limits reduced, having a hard time getting credit in the first place, and there is still a relative credit freeze going on, which means people can’t buy on credit, the former American way. Even credit cards for bad credit are getting harder and harder to come by.
That’s a little tough when we can’t even seem to turn on the news every day without hearing of massive layoffs, how hard it is for people to get jobs now, and we experience the same fear and doom at our jobs individually. I know at my job right now there is a large fear that you may “be next” to reduce costs for a company, and the more you make the more at risk you may be. Once we can get over that fear is when our economy will really look up, until then I’m convinced we are still in trouble.
