A new FDIC program aims to cut into the business of payday lenders. (Steve Rhodes/Planet Money Flickr pool)
By Daniel Costello
Payday loans, also known as payday cash advances, remain a hugely controversial and profitable business. In recent years, several states have imposed strict usury limits on the interest pay day loan companies take, some as high as 400 percent on an annual basis. People who resort to payday lending are typically low-income workers with few assets, and the loans often have the effect of depleting the assets of low-income communities.
Last year, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. began offering banks incentives to offer short-term, small-dollar loans of up to $2,500 to low-income Americans to help those with low or no credit scores get access to regular banking outside of the 23,000 pay day loan outlets nationwide.
According to an interim FDIC report, the pilot program appears to be a success and federal officials have announced they plan to expand the program next year. So far, 31 initial banks collectively have offered $28 million in loans up to $2,500. About 8 percent of customers were delinquent, roughly the industry average.
You like looking at unusual numeric indicators, so here are a few. Last December I was laid off from my job as an assistant editor at a major book publishing company. I was one of about 60 people laid off that day at my company, in a seemingly endless wave of publishing layoffs at most of the big houses. Last week I started a new job, still in book publishing, but on a different career path. Between then and now looked for new work and accrued meaningless statistics on my unemployment. So here you go, my experience of losing my job:
Period of unemployment: 9 months, 3 weeks, 4 days
Number of jobs applied to: 95
Interviews: 15
Jobs interviewed for: 11
Number of interviews for the job I got: 3
Number of drafts of resume: 14
Number of interview suits: 5
Number of friends I begged to forward my resume to their HR departments: 10
Number of business cards collected: 22
Number of business cards handed out: ~400
Weirdest job applied for: Record Keeper for the Guinness Book of World Records
While GMAC seeks a few billion dollars more in federal assistance (its third round of bailout money), its Internet incarnation is drawing fire for "needling" traditional bankers in ads like the one above -- and for offering markedly higher interest rates to depositors.
GMAC's Ally Bank, a Planet Money sponsor, has boasted the top rate in the nation for 12-month certificates of deposit. The national average has been 1.7 percent. At Ally, you can get 2 percent.
The recent ads and rosy rates have drawn $2.9 billion in new deposits. Critics say much of that is "hot" money, meaning customers aren't planning to stick around for the long haul. They just want the highest interest rate, no matter who's offering it.
"GMAC's insolvent, it has been, and I don't know that we can inject enough money into it to fix it," said Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, a Torrance, California, firm that evaluates banks for investors. "The company, frankly, needs to be restructured and liquidated."
Whalen estimates that as much of a 1/4 of Ally's deposits are "hot" money.
Last year, GMAC won government approval to become a bank so it could qualify for TARP assistance. Currently the government owns nearly 35 percent of GMAC under the terms of a $12.5 billion bailout of the Detroit-based company.
The city of Braddock, Pa., ranks among America's most difficult places, alongside emblems of decline and depopulation like Detroit and Flint, Mich. People in Braddock, a steel center outside Pittsburgh, have been trying awfully hard to bring about a revival. Their famous mountain of a mayor, John Fetterman, describes some of the efforts at community farming and urban homesteading in the video above.
Now Braddock is sustaining another blow. Its hospital, a branch of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, has announced that it will close as of Jan. 31, 2010. At a meeting yesterday, hospital officials told distraught and angry residents that the patient load had dropped by 20 percent since the 2007 opening. UPMC Braddock has been on pace to lose $50 million over the next several years. The hospital says four one out five residents already seek health care elsewhere, and now the others can use one of the UPMC satellites within a five-mile radius.
As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports, people in Braddock say they're losing the only ATM in town and, in the hospital's cafeteria, what amounts to their only sit-down restaurant. In fact, they may be giving up more than that. The hospital had become something of an economic engine in the town, employing 670 people. The state had awarded it $3 million for renovations, which the hospital now says it won't spend. In an economy like Braddock's, that kind of money really counts.
Braddock is an extreme case, but it's hardly alone in benefiting from the presence of a medical center. Nationwide, health care spending takes up something like 17 percent of the overall economy. The Iowa Hospital Association calculates that every hospital job there creates another two jobs elsewhere in the state's economy. The Cincinnati Children's Hospital estimates that for every dollar it spends leads to another $1.25 in economic value.
"Just one among scores of foreclosed/bank owned houses I saw in a Latino community at North Las Vegas." (Cartographer / Flickr Creative Commons)
By Laura Conaway
It's a foreclosed world out there. From the AP:
The Census Bureau director says foreclosures will make it tougher and more expensive for census workers to get an accurate count of families next year.
Director Robert Groves said Tuesday in Los Angeles that he expects some questionnaires will land at empty homes in areas hard hit by the housing crisis. That means workers will need to make more door-to-door visits, which costs more money.
Groves says 2010 census workers will look for the newly homeless and people doubling up with relatives.
In many places, the cities are becoming wealthier than their surrounding suburbs. (Bill Lucy/Discovering Urbanism)
By Laura Conaway
God bless the city of Detroit (and with it, Philadelphia). Discovering Urbanism mines the Census Bureau's American Community Survey for a look at how income in several cities compares to income in those cities' suburbs.
As you can see from the chart by suburban scholar Bill Lucy, wealth has been shifting into cities -- except in Philadelphia and Detroit. The picture for Michigan is painful overall, of course -- it's one of five states that saw personal income fall in 2008.
"Pomme de Terre, Pomme en l'Air." (Coins by Matthew Hincman)
By David Kestenbaum
I ran into artist Matthew Hincman last week, who has decided that things have gotten bad enough that it's time to create your own money.
Hincman designed the coin above and had 1,200 minted in copper, which he plans to leave on the ground at random locations for people to pick up and puzzle over.
He says he modeled the coins after the Hard Times Tokens that circulated in the 1800's, many of them satirical.
Hincman has no plans to control the money supply at large.
In fact, he's trying to stay out of trouble. For one recent project, he installed an unusual version of the standard park bench -- it was impounded by the authorities, though they liked it so much, it's now back in place.
Hincman figures there's no law against leaving coins around. He says sometimes drops to one knee and pretends to be tying his shoe, then casually deposits one on the sidewalk.
A new paper based on research in India sheds some light on whether rewarding teachers for students' performance makes a difference. Karthik Muralidharan and Venkatesh Sundararaman -- from the University of California at San Diego and the World Bank, respectively -- looked at 500 schools and 55,000 students.
Their conclusion: pay incentives work. They write:
We find that performance-based bonus payments to teachers were a significantly more cost effective way of increasing student test scores compared to spending a similar amount of money unconditionally on additional schooling inputs.
The National Retail Federation says Americans will be spending less money on candy corns and pumpkin carving tools this season. Halloween sales are expected to drop 18 percent this year, after reaching a four-year high in 2008.
One in three people interviewed by the group this month said the poor state of economy would likely affect their Halloween plans. People mentioned buying less candy, not purchasing new decorations and making costumes instead of purchasing new ones.
Even the holiday's biggest spenders are feeling the pinch, with people between the ages of 18 and 24 saying they'll be spending nearly 21 percent less. Fewer part time jobs and parents less able to help out are some of the reasons cited by teens who are cutting back.
I don't know what it's like where you are, but in New York City today things are very, very quiet. This is Yom Kippur, the highest of Judaism's high holidays. Aside from the nominally Christian protesters who picked our neighborhood synagogue for an anti-Semitic rally, we're enjoying the peaceful breather.
How different from 2008, when the Jewish holidays collided with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The New York Times a year ago described the anxiety among service-goers whose vibrating cell phones sounded like "bees swarming a far-off rhododendron." Theirs was a religious holiday, but unlike on Christmas or Easter, the banking world kept churning. From the Oct. 1, 2008, NYT:
Some worshipers arrived at Rosh Hashana services carrying The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. Others slipped out from time to time to check their voice mail and e-mail messages.
"I would never do this inside synagogue, but I needed to put my mind to rest," said Gary Herman, a hedge fund manager who stepped out of the Tuesday morning service at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue at 65th Street and switched on his BlackBerry to see how the market was doing.
Mr. Herman said it was trying to sit through a three-hour service on a nerve-wracking day for the markets. "Every time a person asks you, 'How are you?' what they are really eliciting are your thoughts about the market," he said.
Back then, it was hard to see when the economy would ever be normal again. We're aways off, certainly, with unemployment and foreclosures rising. And yet I find it comforting to note the change even a single year can bring.
For the average country, output per capita declines by about 10 percent of its precrisis trend and fails to rebound seven years after the crisis, although there is a large variation in outcomes across crisis episodes.
Some of our actions have yielded progress. Some have laid the groundwork for progress in the future. But make no mistake: this cannot be solely America's endeavor. Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world's problems alone.
"We cannot hinge future world growth simply on an overextended American consumer. That is not a wise strategy and that is certainly not the strategy of the government of Canada."
After the jump, a watchword for Communist Party of China.
The financial system needs one very powerful regulator, says economist Mark Thoma, and that regulator should be the Federal Reserve. Thoma takes a look at Sen. Chris Dodd's proposal, which would combine the Federal Reserve, Office of Thrift Supervision, FDIC and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
Thoma likes Dodd's push to end regulator shopping, or arbitrage. It's just that Thoma think the logical approach is to give more power to the Fed and not to a new agency. He writes:
First, the agency in charge of regulating the financial system needs to be independent. For the Fed, there's a well-established tradition about what independence means, and that tradition has served us fairly well. The Fed also attempts to represent public, private, financial, and business interests, and though there is room for improvement in this area, this is also an attractive feature of the Fed's institutional structure. If we start all over with a separate agency, can we be assured that such independence and representation of interests will be present, and if it is, that it will persevere?
Every once in a (long) while you sit down to hear an economic talk and are surprised to hear it delivered in plain English, with humor even.
And when it happens we try to post it for you. Here's Austan Goolsbee, chief economist of Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board talking this week at a conference hosted by The New Repulic.
Goolsbee gave his thoughts on the past year ("Jesus, I say that was a dog year if ever that was a dog year") on people who would cancel the stimulus ("I kind of think we're in loony land") and on what lies ahead for the economy.
"After decades of teaching, I view everything around me as a final exam and assign it letter grades."
Reinhardt's report card gives Obama an A- overall. But when it comes to the president's pitch for a public health plan option? B-/C+
As an economist... I have some trouble buying the president's argument that a new public plan, added to the existing large number of private insurance vehicles, would inject more competition into the market for health insurance and that more competition in that market would help lower the cost of health care.
Reinhardt says someone in the Political Science department might give that part of the speech an A, though.
Rosemary Williams outside her foreclosed home in Minneapolis. (Christopher Loren Thompson/ Planet Money Flickr pool)
By Caitlin Kenney
Listener Christopher Thompson sends these powerful photographs taken outside the foreclosed home of Rosemary Williams, a Minneapolis woman who for months has refused to leave her property. Seven protesters were arrested outside the home over the weekend for breaking through plastic police tape roping it off. Minnesota Public Radio reports:
Williams has been fighting eviction for months. GMAC said in a statement that it has attempted to negotiate several arrangements that would have allowed Williams to remain in her home, but they all fell through.
Williams was ordered to leave her property on Aug. 7, when Hennepin County sheriff's deputies served the eviction notice and changed the locks on her house. But a group of her supporters broke the locks and have been occupying the home ever since, vowing to stay despite the order.
"We intend to protest this," said activist Mick Kelly this afternoon. "Our goal is to get justice for Rosemary, to allow Rosemary to stay in her home."
Williams accepted a $5,000 check from GMAC this afternoon, but has not yet decided whether to cash it. A GMAC spokesperson said the company provided the money to help Williams relocate to a new residence.
Foreclosure filings last month were down less than 1 percent from July. According to RealtyTrac, there were 358,471 foreclosure filings nationally.
The U-index measures the proportion of one's time in which the strongest feeling is a negative one. This graph measures women aged 18-68 who are not full time students in the cities of Columbus, Ohio, Rennes, France and Odense, Denmark. (Alan Krueger/The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress)
By Caitlin Kenney
What is the best way to measure economic health? That was the challenge French President Nicholas Sarkozy presented to a commission led by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz when he asked them to consider the current state of statistics about the economy and society.
...Perhaps had there been more awareness of the limitations of standard metrics, like GDP, there would have been less euphoria over economic performance in the years prior to the crisis; metrics which incorporated assessments of sustainability (e.g. increasing indebtedness) would have provided a more cautious view of economic performance. But many countries lack a timely and complete set of wealth accounts -- the 'balance sheets' of the economy -- that could give a comprehensive picture of assets, debts and liabilities of the main actors in the economy.
@Brimley posts this to the Planet Money Flickr pool -- he says he found this issue of Indiana Business from 2005 while moving his office.
The coverline asks whether RVs "will continue to be HOT SELLERS." Back then, the industry centered on Elkhart County, Ind., had just notched its best year since John Travolta fit into that white suit. The prosperity didn't last long. Today, Elkhart County has famously hit very hard times. It suffered a 17.8 percent decline in employment, the nation's largest, from December 2007 to December 2008, hit a jobless rate of 16.7 percent as of July.
So will RVs "continue to be HOT SELLERS"? As Brimley answers the magazine's headline, "I think the answer is 'no.' "
David Wood sends this picture from Roseville, Calif., northeast of Sacramento, land of 11.8 percent unemployment. Wood writes that the picture is just two days old:
It's on the door of a Swirls yogurt shop that opened in early fall 2008. Even though it is immediately next door to a very popular and thriving Tex-Mex style restaurant they never attracted many customers.
I am a longtime patron of the restaurant but I never entered the yogurt shop. I often saw the lone worker sitting at a table reading a paperback. As an entrepreneur and business owner myself, my heart breaks for the people that must have put so much effort, time, AND money into this venture.
But I can't help but be reminded of the comment my favorite banker made when I asked her if I was crazy to mortgage my house for start-up money 20 years ago. She said (exactly), "You'll be okay because you are doing something that you are an expert at. At least you're not opening a yogurt shop."
You may think we here at Planet Money are the biggest geeks around. Here's compelling evidence to the contrary: EVE Online, the "massively multiplayer" game that's now witness to a virtual banking crisis, has its own economist.
Eyjolfur Gudmundsson reports in his second quarter 2009 newsletter that EVE is a closed world with a very, very free market. Gudmundsson, who's from Iceland and should know a thing or two about banking crises, writes:
"Financial institutions are not regulated by any high level authority within EVE. Deposits with banks are not insured. There is no government to support the financial system or any lender of last resort.
'It looked okay to me until my wife came home and said the back didn't look too great.' (Dan Morelle / Flickr / Creative Commons)
By Laura Conaway
"Use it up. Wear it out. Make it do, or do without." People have been living by those words since long before the Great Recession -- I first heard them in Maine, probably about the time we were driving a century-old spile into a freshly tapped maple tree. Sugar's free, if you've got time to make it yourself.
First, more people are cutting their own hair or getting a family member to do it for them (count me in), which is great until someone goes a little wild with the clippers and lands in the Wall Street Journal.
Second, when times get tough, tough guys stop buying new underwear. The Washington Post reports that the men's underwear index, or MUI, has been falling but lately at a much slower rate. The idea is that since underwear don't show, men who are worried about money will wear a pair until they're in tatters. A spokeswoman for Target says sales have picked up recently, especially sales of multi-pair packs. No less an eminence than Alan Greenspan himself has used the men's underwear index as way to gauge the economy.
The more you borrowed, the less able you are to guess what your payments will be. Click to enlarge.(Sallie Mae/Gallup)
By Caitlin Kenney
That Sallie Mae/Gallup poll about student loans is still stirring up dust, with people arguing about whether it accurately reflects how much debt people are taking on for school. The survey found that fewer families borrowed money to send someone to college in 2008-2009 than the year before. I'm still thinking about it too and one section that particularly stands out to me is where they asked students to estimate their monthly loan payment once they graduate. The students were off -- by a lot.
Twenty-three percent of students wouldn't venture a guess at all, which I personally chalk up to fear. Can you blame them for not wanting to put a number to their future debt-filled lives?
The more debt you're staring at, the less likely you are to have a handle on the monthly load. Look at the chart above. Estimates from students who expected to borrow $10,000 or less were pretty close, but as their loans grew, the estimates all over the map. Sallie Mae says the range of estimates was $2 to $80,000 per month (those are the optimists who think they're going to pay it all back at once).
Over at MarketWatch, Chuck Jaffe thinks that the new rules have too many loopholes and unintended consequences that will endanger consumers:
For example, starting August 20, card issuers must give 45 days' notice before any rate hike. Alas, that only applies to fixed-rate cards, a loophole that most industry watchers say means that it won't apply to more than 90% of the cards issued; many issuers of fixed-rate cards have been converting them to variable rates in advance of the new rules.
In an article set to be published tomorrow, IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard says recovery has begun but warns that returning the economy to "normal" is going to be a long, hard process. He writes:
The turnaround will not be simple, the crisis has left deep scars, which will affect both supply and demand for many years to come.
As for what that recovery will look like, Blanchard has a few ideas:
First, the crisis is likely to have led to a decrease in potential output. One should not expect very high growth rates in the recovery.
Second, sustained recovery in the United States and elsewhere eventually requires rebalancing from public to private spending.
Third, sustained recovery is likely to require an increase in U.S. net exports and a corresponding decrease in the rest of the world, coming mainly from Asia.
Blanchard also notes that even though current forecasts predict positive growth in many countries, it will "will not be quite strong enough to reduce unemployment, which is not expected to crest until some time next year."
The number one car folks are buying with clunker-cash: the Toyota Corolla (danakin / Flickr/Creative Commons)
By Mathew Katz
The AP has a list of the top ten vehicles being purchased by folks trading in their clunkers as part of the Obama Administration's "Cash for Clunkers" program. The Toyota Corolla is at the top of the list, and Ford makes it on the list twice with the Focus and the Escape. Besides those two, all of the cars are imports -- Chrysler and GM cars don't even make it onto the list.
Of course, due to bankruptcies and dealer shutdowns, Chrysler and GM don't quite have the sales and industrial infrastructure that they used to -- and it could just be a lack of supply that's leading to a fewer sales than other manufacturers. Most auto manufacturers have announced production increases in the wake of the clunkers program, but it's clear that some are selling more than others. Since GM and Chrysler are both re-starting old assembly shifts, they could soon have enough supply to edge their way onto that top ten list. Of course, there's another factor in all this: many consumers find GM and Chrysler to be just plain unreliable.
Government offices like this one are closed today. (mason.flickr / Flickr/Creative Commons)
By Caitlin Kenney
Non-essential city services are closed in Chicago today. The city's public libraries, health clinics, town hall and other offices have been shut down as part of an effort to help balance the 2009 budget. Today's closure is one of three planned reduced-service days this year, the other two will be held the Friday after Thanksgiving and on Christmas Eve. The city expects the three reduced-service days to save $8.3 million.
"Every dollar we save from these measures helps to save jobs, and in the long-term, maintain service for Chicagoans," said Mayor Richard M. Daley. "This plan engages most civilian employees to accept cuts and to be part of the solution to our budget crisis. I want to thank them again for their sacrifice."
In addition to working without pay today, city workers have been asked to take six furlough days and six unpaid holidays this year. Mayor Richard M. Daley says the city is expecting a 2009 budget shortfall of between $250 million and $300 million.
The Town and Country broke down by the side of the road one day. (Courtesy of Michael Langdon)
By Laura Conaway
Among the people who took advantage of Cash for Clunkers are Michael Langdon and his wife, Baraba Ebel-Langdon of Newaygo, Mich.
They clunkered a 1997 Chrysler Town and Country minivan, for which they'd been told to expect a trade-in value of about $1,000 (the Kelly Blue Book puts the sale value at $4,750 to $6,075). The government says it gets 14 miles to the gallon in the city, 20 on the highway.
The mileage in the photo of above is considerably less, as that's when the Town and Country overheated and left them stranded by the road. After the jump, what they bought.
Faced with shrinking profits, Procter & Gamble is rethinking some of its products. The Wall Street Journal (sub req'd) reports that the company has "quietly rolled out" a cheaper version of its famous Tide detergent. Tide Basic costs about 20 percent less than regular Tide and is significantly cheaper than premium versions like "Tide Coldwater," "Tide with a Touch of Downy," or "Tide with Febreeze Freshness."
Procter & Gamble decided to go ahead with the product last January, but the Journal reports that it wasn't an easy decision:
Executives feared that a cheaper version might cannibalize sales of regular Tide, which accounts for more than $3 billion of P&G's $79 billion in annual revenues. Marketers at the company have been so loath to sully their prized soap brand that they've wrestled with the matter at least eight times in the past three decades.
Let's say you're going about your business one day, when the economy comes along and announces other plans for you. In an instant, you're out of work and staring at a growing pile of bills and a checking account that's only getting smaller. What do you do?
For the former office workers in this video, the answer turned out to have four wheels and a meter. Thanks to Columbia University's Richard Gergel and Simon Doolittle for sharing their work with us.
The American Bankruptcy Institute reports that July saw the highest monthly number of bankruptcies since 2005, when Congress overhauled bankruptcy procedures to prevent abuses of the system. There were 126,434 bankruptcy filings in July, a 34.3 percent increase over last year, and an 8.7 percent jump from last month's numbers.
This is basically the recession's chickens coming home to roost. Bankruptcies are a delayed indicator, representing months of financial stress, so it's not surprising that they've hit a high among other signs of recovery. The institute is predicting 1.4 million new bankruptcies by the year's end--- we're at over 802,000 right now.
As I was listening to the news this morning that the Cash for Clunkers program was out of cash, I wondered for the first time what was actually happening to the clunkers. The idea behind the government program is to take old low-mileage cars off the road and provide a stimulus for the auto industry.
But if we just resell the old cars, or Mexico buys them, it's not really helping the environment. On the other hand, destroying the cars seems like a waste too -- after all, these are cars that still run.
As you might imagine, Cash for Clunkers struck a compromise:
"The CARS Act requires that the trade-in vehicle be crushed or shredded so that it will not be resold for use in the United States or elsewhere as an automobile. The entity crushing or shredding the vehicles in this manner will be allowed to sell some parts of the vehicle prior to crushing or shredding it, but these parts cannot include the engine or the drive train."
That's a lot of disassembly, and it means paying work for the economy. Auto technician John Eichorn tells the local TV station in Peoria:
"It's kind of backwards because we're used to fixing them. But it's kind of fun to destroy them at the same time."
The Conference Board's consumer confidence index dropped today to 46.6 from 49.3. It's the index's second monthly drop in a row, and July's plunge was greater than economists had forecast. This month's reading is not nearly as bad as February's record low of 25.3, but it doesn't line up with some of the better-ish indicators we've been seeing lately.
Still, it does make a certain degree of sense. Brighter GDP forecasts and rising house prices aside, most people base their opinions of the economy on their own income and job security. You're not likely to feel confident in your prospects -- or buy a big-screen TV -- when you're in danger of being laid off. And with the Fed predicting 10 percent unemployment by the year's end, consumers have little reason to be optimistic about their economic situations, or to get out there and spend.
Queen Elizabeth had a question, the same one many of you have asked: Why did so many economists fail to see the economic crisis coming? The queen got a chance to ask that at one of the discipline's great temples, the London School of Economics.
In response, a group of leading economists have written the queen a three-page letter apologizing for a "psychology of denial." They wrote:
Everyone seemed to be doing their own job properly on its own merit. And according to standard measures of success, they were often doing it well. The failure was to see how collectively this added up to a series of interconnected imbalances over which no single authority had jurisdiction.
This picture comes to us from @scotthendo via aeikenberry. Could the hours on the treadmill have been cut down because of the recesssion?
I called up the charity-walker in the picture, and it turns out that the sign was mostly a joke. David Schoenenberger of Carmel, Ind., tried to walk for 24 hours straight last year to raise money for March of Dimes. It proved too exhausting, so he committed only to 12 this year.
Still, he says the recession hurt his fund raising -- last year, he pulled in $650, this year only about $200.
"People want to give," he said. "But places that gave 30, 40, 50 dollars last year, gave five this year."
The talk at my New York City breakfast table this morning was all about air-conditioning, and specifically our family's choice to see how long we can go this summer without it. Call it our concession to the recession, but it probably has as much to do with the hassle of wrangling the window units into place during a season that just hasn't been that hot.
And we're not alone. People in hot places like the Deep South are saving money by giving up the A.C., the New York Times reports:
Genma Holmes, a 42-year-old mother of three in Nashville, and her husband, Roger, declared their suburban ranch house a no-air-conditioning zone last summer as surging gas prices ate into the profits of their pest control business. Their children -- now ages 17, 18, and 23 -- were not amused, given that average summer temperatures in Nashville are in the high 80s with around 90 percent humidity.
"They didn't look at it from our economic point of view," said Ms. Holmes, who ripped the thermostat from the wall after her offspring repeatedly turned on the central air while their parents were out. "They thought we were doing something to them personally. They thought mom and dad were going through some kind of midlife crisis, like when we recycled before everyone started doing it."
As noted on the podcast yesterday, CIT Group, the company that's in the news, that you may never have heard of before, does make loans to lots of places you have heard of, including the individual operators of Dunkin' Donuts stores.
CIT asked for government assistance, arguing its failure could precipitate a crisis for as many as 300,000 retailers.
Dunkin' Donuts doesn't seem to count itself among them...
If you're the boss of a for-profit company, you want to make as much money as possible and keep your staff productive. One seemingly obvious way to motivate staff would be to pay people for better performance. Performance pay is being discussed in schools and on Wall Street and on Planet Money. But here's one argument against it. Answer these questions:
Are you more productive than your average co-worker?
Are you a better than the average driver?
Are you more intelligent than the average American?
I found a number of items at "The Long Beach Depot for Creative Reuse", in Long Beach, CA. In fact, it's a seriously fun place to hang out! I've met folks there who will buy 5-cent doobobs for their children, and they leave happier than clams. As you can see, it's a multimedia art supply store, but it carries things that are fun for all, as well as showing off some of the finished products from local artists.
Seen in Lakewood, Wash. u.dweller/Planet Money Flickr pool
Flickr user u.dweller sends the photo above. She writes: "This is my idea of a green shoot." It's been just over a year since IndyMac failed and was seized by federal regulators.
Some positive news from the folks over at the Globe and Mail. According to one little-known economic indicator, the white paint index, we're on the way to recovery.
Economists track the price of a key ingredient in white paint, titanium dioxide. The price of titanium dioxide took a huge plunge back in January, and companies that make white paint have been cutting back production because of the recession. Over the past three months, the price has been falling, but at a progressively slower pace. Titanium dioxide prices fell 4.6 percent over the year in June, compared to a 5.1 percent drop for the year in May. Economists think that the price of white paint will begin to rise within the coming months, going along with a broader economic recovery.
We're working on a story about small change here at Planet Money, and we need your help. We want to know how many things you can buy, today, in the U.S. for five cents or less. That means total cost equal to or under $0.05. Send us a picture (that shows the price) and a story (if you like) to planetmoney@npr.org or add them to our Flickr pool or Facebook group.
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has an interesting and critical take on the pope's encyclical in today's Wall Street Journal (sub req.'d). Pope Benedict XVI called on financiers this week to "rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity."
Most of the encyclical, appropriately, expresses a desire for ethical conduct. The importance of ethics for civilization is obvious, but of course good ethics, consistently applied, are hard to come by. People are very good at ethical and psychological compartmentalization, and so it is possible for them to offer the church nominal authority over the ethical realm while continuing their dubious economic behavior.
It should be said that, despite moments of coherence, the encyclical is a sprawling mess that reads as if it was written by a bureaucracy that felt it had to mention everyone's concern. What does it mean to write: "The transition inherent in the process of globalization presents great difficulties and dangers that can only be overcome if we are able to appropriate the underlying anthropological and ethical spirit that drives globalization towards the humanizing goal of solidarity"? It sounds as if somebody has read Hegel. It's good that the document repeatedly reminds us that globalization doesn't have to be bad. But what exactly do we do with that knowledge?
Your belief that everything's going to be OK is falling sharply, according to the University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey. The preliminary reading from the first part of July stands at 64.6, down from June's final reading of 70.8.
As Calculated Risk points out, consumer sentiment is a conincident indicator -- "it tells you what you pretty much already know." Personally, I've been hearing a few new whispers of anxiety about the economy just lately, from people who before now haven't seemed worried about their own situations.
Did South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford consider the cost of his affair? Photo illustration by Lindsay Powell from images by Davis Turner/Getty Images and iStockPhoto
Why do politicians even bother having affairs? Every time another one hangs his head and apologizes to the citizens of the great city/state of Anywhere, USA, we all loudly wonder what he could possibly have been thinking. Didn't he know he'll get caught, put his family through hell, exhaust all of us with the details and jeopardize his career? The costs are so great, how could the affair possibly be worth it?
These questions assume that cheating is a choice -- and a rational one at that, with the chooser considering potential costs and benefits. You know who loves rational decisions like this? Economists.
Looking for a glimmer of hope in the recession? Maybe losing a job can help you become fitter and faster. That's the conclusion of a piece today in the Wall Street Journal (sub. req'd.) that points to improving marathon times across the country in 2009.
For example, there's been a 39 percent increase over last year in runners with times good enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon.
Jobless marathoners have more time to get into peak condition. Casual runners who once struggled to squeeze in a run after a long workday can train on their own schedule. Elite athletes fresh out of college are training more, too, with job prospects so bleak.
What makes all this speedy running particularly notable is that more Americans are entering marathons, which means more novice runners, which should mean slower times.
Pope Benedict XVI signs his letter. L'Osservatore Romano/Getty
Pope Benedict XVI criticized the current economic system and called for a new financial order in a letter to Catholic bishops published today. The letter, called an encyclical, is titled "Caritas in Veritate" or "Charity in Truth." The New York Times reports:
He criticized the current economic system, "where the pernicious effects of sin are evident," and urged financiers in particular to "rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity."
He also called for "greater social responsibility" on the part of business. "Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty," Benedict wrote.
The letter has been two years in the making, and its release comes a day before the Group of Eight meeting, which begins in Italy tomorrow.
California started paying some of its bills in registered warrants
just before the July 4 holiday. It's an extraordinary step.
With the state promising to pay an interest rate of 3.75 percent annually until the warrant is redeemed, a small market for the IOUs has already cropped up, with people looking to buy them and make a profit on the interest. Second Market, a company that trades illiquid assets, has set up a whole team to work on the warrants.
And as you can see in the picture above, the IOUs haven't made for a seamless system. Some banks are still weighing whether or not to accept them while others have set a deadline for cashing them in.
Listener Jun-Dai points out that the FDIC just added pagination to their failed bank list. The press department at the FDIC confirmed the change, which went live last week. FDIC spokesman David Barr says: "With the list getting longer, the Web people were looking at ways to make it more user friendly." Last week six banks in Illinois and one in Texas were added to the list, bringing this year's total up to 52 failed banks.
Last week I spent a day at the Port of Tacoma watching a bunch of longshoremen unload a ship full of 700 Kias. These guys race the cars off the boat one by one. Then they drive them to an enormous parking lot about a half a mile away, where the cars sit and wait for their next stop. These days that wait is much longer than usual.
The Mortgage Bankers Association just released its weekly index of applications to buy a home or refinance a loan, and the numbers aren't good: it fell last week by 19 percent -- the biggest plummet since February. As you can see from our nifty chart, applications have fallen by over 50 percent since April. The data suggests that the Obama administration's plans to help out the housing market aren't entirely working yet.
Reader @spectagirl just tweeted us a link to a job listing at an LA architecture firm, which has an interesting note under "Compensation":
The bad news is we can't pay you what you're worth. The good news is you can stay in the profession, advance your skills, and have an opportunity to grow with us as the market recovers.
Well, at least they're honest. Perhaps applicants will feel lucky the job pays anything. These days many people work for free -- or even pay -- for an internship that gives them a small chance at establishing a career in their field of choice.
Yesterday on the podcast we talked about how the Great Depression gave us the long-term mortgage. In the years following, thanks to major government intervention, we became a nation of homeowners. There are still people who make it all the way through a 30 years and burn the mortgage but the numbers are declining. I've been struggling to figure out whether that's good or bad.
Back in May, we wondered if American consumers might have too many choices. Well, it looks like some companies think so. The Wall Street Journal [subscription req'd] reports that some of the nation's largest retailers, like Wal-Mart and Rite Aid, will be cutting the assortment of products in their stores by at least 15 percent. It's a huge move for the retail industry, where big-box stores have dominated the market by offering consumers a huge variety of products. According to Walgreen vice president Catherine Linder, that's no longer good for business:
All that go-go 1990s where we were adding items in and adding items in, and people wanted more, more, more, more choice... just didn't pay off. People say, 'Whoa, you're bombarding me. Help me figure out what I need.
Andrea recently moved to China to teach English. She writes:
I work in Changzhou, China which is a fairly middling size city for China but which has been hopping aboard the business/development train. I don't think work has ENTIRELY halted because occasionally I see a worker or two, but I pass these buildings every day on my way to work, and they are just sitting there. I haven't seen a change in 3 weeks.
It looks like Tesla Motors isn't the only auto company taking advantage of Detroit's downfall.
A Mumbai-based company, known in North America for their tractors, is planning on bringing a fleet of fuel-efficient compact pickup trucks to the United States. Mahindra & Mahrindra is hoping to become a serious competitor to light trucks like the Toyota Tacoma and Ford Ranger. The company also wants to bring two new SUVs to the U.S. next year.
The Indian company is, quite literally, picking up what American car makers are casting off. Mahindra & Mahindra is working with an American auto importer, Global Vehicles, to quickly set up a large dealer network -- which includes former GM, Chrysler, and Ford dealers that were closed down to cut costs.
I was in Washington DC for Memorial Day weekend and we were walking to the Metro. This Washington Post newsstand struck me as funny. It's a picture of Barack Obama on the front page there.
You know those J.D. Power & Associates studies that you always hear about on car commercials? One of them came out today. And this one had some surprising results: Detroit is actually doing pretty well.
The survey, called the Initial Quality Study, measures the quality of new vehicles after 90 days of ownership. For years, foreign cars have largely trounced American car makers in similar quality surveys, but this year, the Big Three have improved their initial quality by an average of 10 percent. That comes even after Detroit's faced two bankruptcies and large government bailouts.
What's even more noteworthy is that the quality gap between foreign and domestic cars is now the smallest it's ever been, according to David Sargent of JD Power. Things may finally be looking up for Detroit -- at least, in the long run.
Just came across this interview with Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson by Conor Clarke at the Atlantic.
Samuelson is 94 years old now. And you get the sense he might go on for another century.
He gives his take on other luminaries Milton Friedman ("about as smart a guy as you'll meet. He's as persuasive as you hope not to meet") and Alan Greenspan ("the trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy.")
A mall in Wilmington, North Carolina has come up with a unique way to fill empty store space -- add a church. The 250-member church will open in Independence Mall in mid-July. Listener Kate Burton shares this story from her hometown paper. Star News reports:
"Why a church? I'd say why not a church. These days malls are being looked at and leased for lots of nontraditional uses," such as yoga centers, medical clinics and showrooms that drive traffic to other businesses outside the mall, said Susan Godorov, vice president of marketing for Centro Properties Group, which owns Independence Mall.
Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA) has his math wrong. I just heard him on Morning Edition dramatizing the trillion dollar price tag for health-care reform.
"If you converted dollars to seconds and you said how many years will it take for a trillion seconds to pass its 317,097 years 11 months and 2 days."
He's off, by a lot. Isakson is describing what a much more expensive, 10 trillion dollar program would be.
An empty dealer in Kalamazoo, Mich., makes a go of it as a repair shop. Jay P./flickr
We've had some questions from you about our slide show of empty car dealers -- mainly about what happened to all the cars that were left on the lot after Chrysler's June 9 deadline for dealers to shut down.
I called up Howard Sellz, who owned Big Valley Chrysler Jeep Dodge in Van Nuys, Calif., until it closed down with 140 cars left on the lot. He said that dealers had two options: some chose to sell the cars after the deadline, without Chrysler warranties or benefits. Others, he said, took up Chrysler's offer to redistribute the cars to surviving dealerships to be sold.
"I've been here 44 years, to have an empty lot is the most depressing thing I've ever gone through in my life," he said.
Sending your cars to surviving dealership comes with some fees, he said.
As automakers wade through bankruptcy and thousands of car dealerships are closing down, you've sent in photos and stories of the closings in your communities.
Of course, we're always looking for more.
Add your own photos of empty dealers to our Flickr pool or Facebook page, Twitpic them and make sure to let us know on Twitter, or e-mail them.
This book recommends excising daily. Chana Joffe-Walt
Jim Henderson and Bret Ewing are import specialists. That means they sit in an office near the Port of Seattle and monitor every kind of product that enters the country. They are supposed to make sure that importers have paid the appropriate customs duties.
Jim has an encyclopedic knowledge of the U.S. Tariff Schedule (he's also got that enormous book to help him). The tariffs are essentially in place to protect American industry. And lately Jim's been worried about pencils -- pencils from China, to be exact.
Facing a deficit, Reed College -- raise your hands, alums -- went back through its list of accepted students and replaced more than 100 who'd need financial aid with others who could pay full freight. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm just saying it's such a drag.
The Nielsens have kept both their home and sense of humor. Jeff Nielsen
This little drawing came in from Jeff and Chiara Nielsen, who are feeling pretty good these days in their recently refinanced Salt Lake city home.
The first time we heard from Jeff, he was not making art. He was banging his head against the wall trying to get through to his mortgage servicer. On paper, Jeff was the perfect candidate for President Obama's plan to stem home foreclosures. He kept trying to apply, but despite a 100-page application and at least 100 calls to his servicer, he says he could not get any response..
Update: due to popular demand, we've added a chart of commercial airline accidents per million departures after the jump. There seems to be no real link to recession years using that data, either.
Do recessions lead to airplane crashes?
Investigators looking into the disappearance of an Air France flight over the Atlantic last week believe the jet's airspeed indicator failed. Airbus, the manufacturer of the plane, had recently recommended that Air France replace the parts that calculate airspeed, but Air France hadn't completed the work yet.
Air France's stock has been hurting since last year, as it suffers along with the rest of the air industry. That's caused some to wonder whether the economic downturn -- and the cost-cutting that goes with it -- will make flying more dangerous.
Using stats from Air Disaster, a website that pulls in data from the Federal Aviation Administration, I plotted the number of commercial airline accidents during past American recessions above, through 2004. If you see a pattern, let us know -- because I don't.
In April, my husband and I read in our local paper, the Kansas City Star, that they would be reducing the number of sections by eliminating some and combining others. As twenty somethings, we know we are supporting a dying industry. A stark reminder of that occurred Friday night as we walked by the headquarters of the paper (see attached picture). My husband, a teacher, commented he might ask them if he could have some of those chairs for his elementary school.
I'm wondering, is the Star waiting for the economy to rebound, at which time they might need that office equipment? Until then, why keep it in such plain view?
Among the first of many empty dealerships. justice_nd
Reader justice_nd sends us this picture from Atlanta, where the Atlanta Chrysler Jeep Dodge dealership is one of 789 dealers that have until June 9 to close down. Empty dealerships like this one are likely to become a common sight in the coming weeks. We're looking for pictures and stories of what it's like when hundreds of dealers close down.
Add your own photos of empty dealers to our Flickr pool or Facebook page, Twitpic them and make sure to let us know on Twitter, or e-mail them.
If you want to open up a store, but worry about the rent -- you could always build one in a virtual world like Second Life.
Indiana University is set to host a week-long workshop to teach people how to do exactly that.
"A lot of people think you can just put these places together overnight, because you can get an island in Second Life and fairly soon start to put buildings and stuff up," said Lee Sheldon, assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University and the designer of 20 video games. "It's far more complicated than that."
Some economists have studied these virtual worlds, which have their own currencies and markets.
I think I came across a possible Planet Money Indicator: "5 over 2 days." That's the number of car salesmen at my local Ford dealership who called me in response to ONE E-mail I sent through the website inquiring about test driving a new model.
The E-mail was the basic message sent through their website tool. You click on the car that interests you, they find the dealership closest to you, and you can include a short note with any specifics. My specifics were "I'm interested in a lease and want to test drive the Hybrid."
I finally had to ask them to stop calling because I wouldn't be able to schedule anything until the weekend. The whole thing was rather shocking, honestly, but in light of the GM bankruptcy, not really...
Send your Planet Money indicators to planetmoney@npr.org.
Adam Davidson has been following the North Koreaneconomy, such as it is. The Communist nation is among the world's most isolated countries, with little known about its inner workings.
But as you can see in this covert video of a market, from 2005, North Korea is also in many ways a familiar place -- with people buying the makings of a next meal, and vendors making time for lunch, and a baby crying.
20 - the percentage of people I work with who have closed on their first home in the past 2 months. Out of a work group of 25 people, five have finalized a home purchase recently. We work in IT for a state agency in Texas, so our jobs are fairly stable right now. The real estate market in Austin has begun perking up after a mini-slump during the past 6 months, and between the low interest rates, lower home prices, and tax incentives, the young professionals I work with have decided that there is no better time to buy than now.
Of all the financial advice I got from my father, this nugget seems most vexing. I'll paraphrase as best I can:
"If you have to get you a cart and sell apples on Capitol Street, don't ever work for anyone else."
I took Dad to heart on that one, then nearly starved as a freelancer and later fell in love with the teamwork that sometimes comes with staff gigs at big companies.
Alan Cordova looked at compensation data from the Small Business Administration and drew up this chart and the one after the jump. Their message: Bigger companies pay better.
I'll leave the arguing about the upside potential of entrepreneurship to y'all. A note from Cordova, and a second chart, after the jump.
In Ramsey, Minn., unfinished business. Minneapolis Pro/Planet Money Flickr pool
Minneapolis Pro (or ElectroThompson, for the Twitter crowd), send this picture from 2007, of "an unfinished development in a suburb (or satellite city) of Minneapolis, called Ramsey. This picture was taken in 2007, I believe. Nowadays, such scenes are common in this area."
Lately, I find myself struck by the images you folks are sending of housing and commercial developments on ice. Send more, please. I'll try to do something amazing with them.
(Add photos of half-built America to our Flickr pool or Facebook page, Twitpic them and holler out on Twitter or e-mail them. Our moms thank you.)
Jeff Rahn had gotten frustrated with living next to a foreclosed home in Sunnyvale, Calif., so he looked up the public records on it. He reports finding that the neighbors had taken out a pair of mortgages in 2006, then apparently stopped paying and moved away in 2007. The lender, American Home Mortgage, has since gone bankrupt and been sold for upward of $7 million.
In the foreclosure process, American Home Mortgage's creditors agreed to settle, leading to an auction in February 2008. Rahn's not sure why no one bought it and moved in, but the house remained empty. This week a demolition crew showed up, he writes. "Now the house has been reduced to rubble."
He wonders whether banks are just finding it so difficult to sell foreclosed houses that they'd rather bulldoze them. He writes:
I like the idea of banks getting their balance sheets in order, but is this what it leads to in the real world, houses being torn down?
Craig Vorster works in road construction in Central Florida. When the company has more equipment than it needs, it sells the extra. In 2007, as you can see from the folder on the left, it sold not so much. But in 2008?
"The handwriting was really quite on the wall," Vorster says. The work was drying up, and the company started selling off equipment, a move reflected in the larger folder on the right. And the guy whose job it was to sell the old stuff? Vorster says he was laid off.
From Frankfort, Ill., news of an Irish pub that's closing because construction workers are no longer coming in.
Contractors building homes and commercial buildings in the Lincoln-Way area would drop in for lunch, and the dirt and mud clinging to their work boots would collect under chairs and barstools, said [Niall] Freyne, owner of Galway Tribes.
"Now there is no dirt under the barstools," he said Wednesday.
Last call's slated for May 30. Nationwide housing starts are running 54.2 percent below last year's pace. The leg bone's connected to the shin bone, I guess, and one of the toes is in Freyne's bar.
After the jump, another look at building in the region.
But he responded as part of his "Outrage of the Day" segment this week. (Video after the jump.)
I had called CNBC asking to interview Jim Cramer about this academic study that analyzed his stock picks on his show Mad Money.
The conclusion? Cramer got higher returns than the stock market indices, but only by taking on more risk.
The paper has been circulating for a while, but it's now getting published. Anyway, CNBC declined my interview requests. But then, like magic, Cramer starts talking about it on the show.
I spotted this is Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square on my walk to work. There's nothing sadder than pale, hungry, uncaffeinated poets. Where's their bailout?
Today I learned to say acetonitrile, courtesy of chemist Derek Lowe. On his blog, In the Pipeline, Lowe has been covering a global shortage of acetonitrile, a solvent that chemists and pharmaceutical researchers depend on for experiments.
Lowe explains that acetonitrile is a byproduct of acrylonitrile, which is used to make industrial resins and plastics -- everything from Legos and cell phones to car dashboards. With the global slump, and especially the slump in the auto industry, companies stopped making acrylonitrile. Which meant they also stopped making its byproducts. And that's how the chemists found themselves without their favorite solvent.
You know how there are those people that will turn blue or suffer for weeks before they will step foot in a doctor's office? Well, now there are more them. That's according to this survey from the American Academy of Family Physicians. More than half the docs reported that they are seeing fewer patients come in.
The real sad number that caught my eye in here -- 60% of doctors had "seen more health problems caused by their patients forgoing needed preventive care."
If you need some incentive to go to the doctor apparently you'll be spared a couple minutes of Muzak and bad magazines. The wait time is down.
Here's a Planet Money indicator: zero. I got my Chase credit card bill this week and it had a $0 minimum payment, although I had had an abnormally expensive month. It didn't make much sense til I looked closer and found this on my bill:
"You have the flexibility to skip a payment. You must pay past due and overlimit balances immediately. However,the remaining minimum payment for this month has been reduced to $0. Finance charges will continue to accrue. To reduce your balance, feel free to make a payment."
Sounds like quite a nice ploy to dupe me into paying them interest!
I just went to the water cooler here by the science desk and was looking at this chart which has been tacked up there for years. It was part of the absurdist Flying Spaghetti Monster campaign against the intelligent design folks.
Our old friend the Ted Spread is at its lowest point since the crisis began. That's thanks to a lot of help from the government to unfreeze the credit markets.
But another indicator that's fun to check is still running high, the volatility index or VIX. Also known as the fear index, it measures what the market thinks might happen to the stock market. And if you do the math, it says people think the stock market could fall (or rise) 8% in the next month.
One of the things I love about radio is that there will be a story I've read in the papers and thought I understood. But then I'll hear it put together well for radio and I'll realize I didn't feel it the first time round. I didn't really absorb it.
If you have a few minutes, I recommend pressing play on WNYC reporter Ailsa Chang's story about a homeowner who has entered Stage 2 of the housing crisis - filing a lawsuit.
Stanley Balzekas, 85, above, learned this week that his Balzekas Chrysler dealership will lose its franchise. His father started the Chicago business in 1926. The Getty photographer who took the picture notes that Balzekas cried when he opened the letter telling him he was one of 789 dealers Chrysler is closing as it restructures.
Today, General Motors plans to notify 1,100 dealers that it won't be renewing their franchise agreements.
I don't want to push the Great Depression analogy too far, but what's surprising when you go back to primary sources from 1930 is the optimism. I don't mean to imply that everyone thinks things are just swell. But while you know that they are facing the worst economic decade of the twentieth century, they don't. They're expecting something more like the recession that followed World War I. People are cutting back, but they're still spending, particularly because companies are slashing prices to move inventory. It was the long grind of the years that followed, and the catastrophe of the second banking crisis, that scarred them permanently. And this shows up in the economics stats and the stock market, which did not, as we like to imagine, simply decline in a straight line.
Ryan Kellermeyer says that despite our individual hardships, most of us are truly some of the richest people in the world. A few months ago, he downsized his diet to prove the point. Kellermeyer, who admits to carrying some extra pounds, has been eating a single bowl of rice each day and blogging about it as part of a fundraising campaign against hunger.
With a dozen other students at Columbia University J-school this semester, I worked on a series of stories about the economy, including his.
Some soon-to-be-published research finds that CNBC's Jim Cramer's stock picks aren't so crazy.
Two professors at Northeastern University found that following Cramer's advice yielded a 12% annual return on average, compared with 7% for S&P 500 index over the same period.
The other day at the ices stand (think snocone, Hawaiian shave ice, etc.), my seven-year-old popped a wiggly when they handed him his treat in a plastic cup instead of a paper one. Proving why you should never let a first grader do your taxes, he refused the already used plastic one on environmental grounds and walked away happy only when we poured the sugary concoction into a second (readily biodegradable) cup.
For him, plastic is a huge, huge problem.
In the New York Times today, I finally caught up with the apparent phenomenon of The Story of Stuff, a 20-minute take on the perils of consumer culture that has been making the rounds of American classrooms. Some call it an educational breakthrough, some an unfair takedown of capitalism, and I'm betting many economists will say its reasoning is flawed.
But since the next generation's watching The Story of Stuff at school, I'm thinking we might out to watch it together on the blog. I'll reach out to a couple of economists about it, to get their view. The full video's after the jump.
Planet Money listener and self-described "Michigan exile" Chad S. sends along the story of a Michigan couple who are using an economy themed essay contest to sell their home. With an entry fee of $750, the couple hope to raise enough money to sell the farmhouse and start a new life in South Carolina. Besides the fee, entrants are required to write a 500 word essay about how the economy has affected their lives and how winning the home would change that. The Flint Journal reports:
"We want to help someone start their life over, along with ourselves," he said.
Worley, 51, and Debra, 49, have lived in the farmhouse for five years.
He said the 1,200-square-foot home, built in 1892 and possibly eligible for designation as a centennial farm, is worth about $245,000, but he'd be lucky to get half that through a sale in the present economy.
This is an example of the "My Wish" project done by my son's second grade class. There were a few of them with this same sentiment. It breaks my heart that the kids are stressing about the economy too. We're in Rochester, MI near Chrysler HQ, and many people in our neighborhood are in the auto industry. I see more dads on the playground picking up kids from school than in years past, which is nice in a way, but also makes it clear how many lives have been recently changed. (The author's nickname is "Little Mouse" in their second grade mouse world game.)
Last fall I met Iris Glaze at a "Washington Mutual wake." It was a WaMu staff party organized after the thrift collapsed to "remember and celebrate the good times." Iris is a striking personality. She worked in investor relations at Washington Mutual, and you can tell she loves people the minute she meets you, hugs you and asks you for your life story. We met in this huge room full of talented, recently laid-off people -- but still, I thought Iris would charm someone else into hiring her, easily. Apparently not. She writes:
I'm okay. Still searching for a job. I started out looking for the perfect job (which I had at WaMu) but my standards are quickly lowering and now I hope to hear back about my application to be a Wal-Mart greeter. McDonald's turned me down for the fry cook job. Sigh.
I live in Lake Placid, NY, the site of the Ironman, USA. My house and office overlook the road that both the bike and run course use. Every year people flock to Lake Placid to train on the course before July 26th, the race date. In years past, as soon as the snow melted away and the weather gets nice, I would see hundreds of people training every weekend on the course. This year there are a lot fewer athletes.
This does not mean that there are fewer people doing the event.
I went to see my regular seamstress today. She has a small shop in the middle of the upscale district in our city; she caters to a lot of doctors, lawyers, and their wives. I was getting a pair of suit pants hemmed. Normally a job like this would take 2-3 days, but she told me today that it would be almost a month before they would be ready. She said she's seeing a lot of older clothes that need alterations or repair, versus new clothes that just need to be tailored. She mentioned that a lady came in the other day that she had never seen before even though the woman lived less than three blocks from her shop. The lady was having a tear in a dress repaired. My seamstress said the woman was visibly shaken and mentioned that she had been watching CNBC all morning.
So maybe it's a green shoot for my seamstress, but not so much for upscale clothing retailers.
Yesterday the three branches of government faced off against the fourth estate in the annual three mile footrace known as the Capitol Challenge.
I didn't see any Treasury or Fed folks. But Walter Lukken, a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission ran seven-minute miles, not too shabby.
Come on Geithner! Bernanke! Let's see what you've got!
The other portable toilets were labeled "Yes You Can," "House," "Senate," "Executive Branch," Print Media (with job security)," "Print Media (without job security)," "Complaints" and "Tax Counseling while you wait."
There's a whole group of people being affected by the swine flu that you probably haven't heard about -- clowns. Entertainer Mandy Dalton says several clients have warned her that they might cancel her gigs because they're scared the kids could get sick.
Being a clown isn't cheap. Dalton's handmade shoes cost about $200 to $300 a pair and her costumes run her close to $200, after the discount she gets from a designer friend. Add in stilts, liability insurance (yes, clowns have to carry that) juggling equipment, and unicycles and you have some some serious expenses. "Clowns are the blue collar workers of the entertainment industry," she says.
We'll aim to have more from her on the podcast next week.
On my short bike ride to work every morning I pass at least four foreclosed homes. Out in the Seattle suburbs it definitely seems like every block has a house up for sale. But a Census Bureau report says fewer Americans are moving. There are empty homes, and people are not buying new homes, so where are they?
The Census 65% that did move are in the same county. Are people are crashing on couches? The Detroit News says a lot of people in trailer parks. The homeless count is up in Las Vegas. And tent cities are popping up all over. Empty homes are such a visible sign of the recession. But the people from homes are relatively hidden.
The other day my friend was saying she thought that the different ways our friends are responding to the recession is really telling.
I think about that idea a lot in terms of our large institutions. Some will just sit down through the squeeze but others will be permanently changed by the experience. Then I read that this recession has public colleges considering becoming something totally different -- private colleges. The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that the last time state funds dwindled at public universities in Colorado, Massachusetts and Virginia, the schools took steps towards fiscal autonomy.
Basically they thought hey, forget begging the state capital for dough every year, if we go private we can watch the tuition roll in. This debate comes up every time states cut university budgets, and some argue privatization is a euphemism for "Let's charge more tuition."
Of course, it's not as if private colleges are sailing through the recession, either.
All day, I've been looking around for something amazing to post about the news from Detroit. General Motors is axing 2,600 dealers, 21,000 workers and four brands (including Pontiac and Hummer) -- and leaving the U.S. in the position of owning at least half the company. Chrysler, meanwhile, says it has reached a deal with the United Auto Workers Union, with the terms for the rank-and-file vague enough that one guy on an assembly tells us he's guessing it means a pay cut, but who knows how big.
And then there's this banner headline that appeared on the Wall Street Journal's homepage around 2 p.m.:
"GM CEO says company needs to be run simpler, leaner in future."
You might have missed it, because really it amounts to a local news story. But the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee this week filed (according to the press release) the "first charges in connection with a SIGTARP investigation" against one Gordon B. Grigg whom, it is alleged, embezzled more than $10,922,000.
Yesterday we heard from Per Gullestrup, a shipowner, who had a ship hijacked last November. When he ironed out the ransom details with the pirates, he had 3 demands:
1. The pirates showed "proof of life" (that the crew was still alive)
2. That they could drop the money from the air (faster than getting it there in a tug)
3. That the pirates fill up the ship with fuel.
Looks like the Stolt Strength, a Philippine tanker that was just released 5 months after pirates seized the ship, is probably wishing it demanded number 3 too. Dr. J Peter Pham just sent me a note saying it is dead in the water.
Formally called "Bail Out Night", this restaurant offers half off food during dinner. Seth Flynn Barkan
Realty Trac, a website that tracks foreclosures, reports today that Las Vegas has the highest rate of foreclosure filings of any U.S. city. The rate of households receiving a default or auction notice or being seized by a lender is 4.5 percent, seven times the national average. See the full list of cities here.
Count Dean Miller -- a self-described "red-blooded American capitalist" -- among those who think newspapers will be around and making money for a long time. Miller was until recently the editor of the Idaho Falls Post-Register, a job he had held for about 14 years until he locked horns one too many times with the head of his company. (Disclosure: I met Miller at a professional conference at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg and have kept in friendly contact since.)
I spoke with Miller because of a fact that often gets overlooked: While most of the ink, blood and tears spilled over newspapers involves big-city dailies, smaller papers have tended to fare better. He says many of the most influential regional papers in the country have forgotten to focus carefully enough on their local readers and advertisers and are weighed down by major debt.
But he offers lessons for the bigger names in the newspaper industry, culled in no small part from his experiences in eastern Idaho.
"Kelley refocused the newspaper's mission to concentrate on enterprise and investigative reporting. Kelley imagined a daily paper in the vein of magazines like The Economist, Time and Sports Illustrated."
-- Las Vegas Sun, April 21, 2009
Amid the annual festival of self-celebration that is the Pulitzer Prize process is the hulking brute of a business story.
The New York Times won five -- five! -- Pulitzers, but the parent Times Co. reported a brutal plunge in its first quarter earnings. (Others are faring even worse: The McClatchy Newspaper company has been warned its stock price has fallen so sharply that it may be dropped from the New York Stock Exchange listing.)
As the Boston Globe appears to be the greatest financial drag on the Times Co., media critic Adam Reilly of the Boston Phoenix has called on it to use the Globe as a lab to test out innovations that executives hope will work for the New York Times itself.
Another Pulitzer-winning publication appears to have done just that: the Las Vegas Sun. In just four years, it appears to have reinvented itself from a trailing paper in a two-daily town into a multi-media power.
The American Sterling Bank in Sugar Creek, Missouri, was seized by the FDIC on April 17, 2009. User47/Planet Money Flickr pool
Jesse writes:
As a bit of a history nut, I went out today and pictures of some of the failed (and troubled) banks in my area. As I'm sure you know last Friday the FDIC seized American Sterling Bank which was headquartered in Sugar Creek, MO, just a stones throw from Lee's Summit. I've taken pictures of one of the branches as well as their HQ. Also included in the set are pics of an old Columbian Bank & Trust branch (seized by the FDIC in 2008), and the now abandoned construction site of what was to be a new Columbian bank branch. Finally I have pictures of a bank which was built in a hurry but now sits empty with no signage.
I live in Seattle, where every other person you meet works for a startup. Usually that means they're a computer person with an idea. After a while you stop asking about the ideas (there are just too many!).
All those people with ideas need money to get going from venture capitalists or "angel investors." But the idea money is just not flowing like it used to.
According to data from the National Venture Capital Association this is the first time in years that there were two consecutive quarters without an IPO by a venture-backed company.
The Center for Venture Research says the amount invested by angels (very early-stage investors for startups) fell by 26 percent last year. That said, the number of investments fell overall by only 2.9 percent. So there is still a bunch of early-stage investing, but those angels are less willing to take risk.
The news that General Growth had gone bankrupt was a bit close for Andrew Wardlaw. That's because his hometown was designed by one of the mall owner's acquisitions, before the smaller real estate company became a really expensive part of the giant one's ledger. Andrew writes:
I grew up in Columbia, MD, a city that was planned and developed by the Rouse Corporation. Columbia is quirky place. None of the roads are straight so you don't feel like you're a spot on a grid. There are strict rules on what you can do to your house, power lines and cable lines must be underground. Most neighborhoods had a community swimming pool within walking distance. Neighborhoods are clustered around shopping centers, which were initially designed keep the store fronts facing away from the streets. Businesses weren't allowed to have signs above a certain size, and neon was forbidden. As a teenager I hated the restrictions, but now that I'm living in CA, I'd appreciate knowing that the person who's about to move next-door can't park a junky RV on the curb next to my house.
Even before the recession hit, there was a lot of angst -- and a lot of layoffs -- inside the news business as journalists fretted about how we will be able to afford to report the news. Now it's outright panic. Los Angeles Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein reportedly defended putting an advertisement on the front page of his paper by saying, "I'm just trying to keep the lights on here, folks."
And yet, out of tumult comes opportunity. And as the traditional newspaper model cracks apart, we're seeing a profusion of new proposals from actors old and new. We've heard from a few Planet Money regulars that you'd like to learn more about them.
When the Seattle Post-Intelligencer printed its last newspaper and went online, my wife and I resolved to actually go and see where the Baltimore Sun where she works is printed.
You can see why printing a paper is an expensive undertaking.
CJ Hendrix asks whether he's seeing the future of American banking in Port au Prince, Haiti, where he lives:
On virtually every street you will find these small shacks called Banks: Titi Bank, Chez Bank, and all sorts of religiously named banks: Thanks to God Bank, Hope from God Bank, etc. This one is not even close to the least-confidence inspiring. Some of them remind me of the tin shacks that used to sell fireworks on some empty lot in my hometown before the 4th of July. In fact, they aren't banks at all, but loto shops.
That's loto as in lotto, to those of us playing along in the U.S.
As the last of the paper filers crunches numbers and races to the Post Office, Tea Party protests are taking place around the nation. President Obama promised today to rewrite the "monstrous" tax code (may I suggest starting with the child-tax credit part?), but it's more the various bailouts that have the Tea Partiers in the streets.
For more on those, try Pro Publica's new bailout page. It's so clickable.
"Two Beanie Babies Sittin' in a Tree" Extra Medium/Flickr
I love this comment from a listener, Brian Lalonde, about our podcast last night on mark-to-market accounting:
So if I have 12 metric tons of Beanie Babies and no one wants to buy them, it's because the *market* is broken!
Where were you when we were writing the podcast script yesterday?
If you're really stuck with 12 metric tons of Beanie Babies, you might check out ArtLoan, which I think would lend you a pile of cash if you put the stuffed animals down as collateral.
I talked with one of the folks there a few weeks back who said the company accepts high-end art, but you can also bring them your Swatch watch collection. Apparently really fanatical collectors would rather give up food than lose their snow globes or whatever. So they usually pay back the loan.
There is something so strangely undramatic about this and past piracy dramas. There are no eye patches, drinking grog or really anything very exciting going on here. Most of the time Navy Seals don't snipe pirates. And a lot of time, the whole thing just sounds like a mundane business deal: the pirates negotiate price, they have a spokesman, and they document the inventory for the "customer." This video is from a hijacking last year. The source tells Wired they make videos like this to show the owners the ship is still in good condition.
I saw this "Stimulus Savings" sign in a computer repair store in Overland Park, Kansas. What will happen to the salaries of the employees if their work is only worth 80% of what it once was? Don't worry - the pay-day loans place a couple doors down is hiring. Oh boy...
Today's indicator: 10,000 people in two hours. Mark V. shares the story of a New Hampshire job fair that drew so many applicants it paralyzed most of the main thoroughfares. The Nashua Telegraph reports:
"It was a crazy madhouse in there," said 28-year-old Amy Girard, of Weare, referring to the gymnasium where 140 employers had gathered to offer 1,000 positions.
Back at the mall, job seekers waited for up to two hours to board buses. Organizers had booked 12, each holding about 50 people. When it became apparent that shipping 600 people per hour was not going to cut it, organizers called in five more buses -- including two to operate in the downtown Manchester area.
"We called every (local) school bus driver to see if they can take a shift," said Evan Rosset, assistant executive director of the Manchester Transit Authority.
If you find plunges in our stock market dizzying, check out what happened to the Chinese contemporary art market. NPR story and photo's here. Today Gady Epstein at Forbes has another autopsy:
"By a year ago, both signature and lesser-known works were selling for 10 times higher than two or three years earlier, which was another 10 times higher than two or three years before that."
The Wall Street Journal writes today about an increase in the number people getting into the hot dog business. The Journal reports that most of them are trying boost their rainy day funds:
Sales of carts, which start at about $2,000 new, have heated up in the past year. "Every model is...taking off," says Joel Goetz, owner of American Dream Hot Dog Carts Inc. in St. Petersburg, Fla. Since January, he has sold about 25 carts a week, 15 more than usual.
"Business is really off the charts," says Dan Jackson, a division manager at Nation's Leasing Services in Newbury Park, Calif. Leases for hot-dog carts account for about three-quarters of sales, and revenue is triple what it was this time a year ago, he says.
A friend in New York sent this to me. It's from Beaver Street, right around the corner from the New York Stock Exchange. I'd be curious how much I could get for all my broken jewelery.
Seen in Barcelona. Sarah Ullman/Planet Money Flickr pool
Sarah writes from Morocco:
While I was on vacation in Barcelona, there were at least two or three protests that went by my hostel in the week that I was there. One dealt with the gentrification of the Barcelonea neighborhood, but the others were against the financial crisis. I had just started to take protests for granted when I saw naked women writhing under a fishing net! We were too late to get pictures of that, but we did get some of the demonstrators and their signs.
Know how to audit a $700 billion bailout program for waste, fraud and abuse? Can you comb through huge balance sheets without falling asleep? Then the government wants you.
The U.S. unemployment rate we usually hear about hit 8.5 percent last month.
But there's another unemployment number, one represented in the chart above: 15.6 percent. That's the rate of U-6, one of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' "alternative measure of unemployment." (The 8.5 percent rate is the U-3 rate.)
The BLS first included alternative measures to the U-3 rate in 1976 to allow people to see the unemployment situation from different angles.
Sometimes we coin terms without actually having a good definition for them. I'm thinking about "toxic assets" but also "too big to fail," which I've now seen as simply TBTF.
Vincent Reinhart who spent 25 years at the Fed, took a stab at defining it during a recent talk.
"Too big to fail," he said is "a big umbrella today, covering banks and non-banks." He threw up a slide defining four categories of TBTF:
Robert Reich, who served under President Clinton as secretary of Labor, takes a look at today's unemployment figures and declares, "It's a Depression."
Reich draws on the government's broadest measure of job loss, which has one in every six Americans as either unemployed or underemployed. Most of us are within two degrees of separation from someone out of work, he says. Reich writes:
All this means that the real economy will need a larger stimulus than the $787 billion already enacted. To be sure, only a small fraction of the $787 billion has been turned into new jobs so far. The money is still moving out the door. But today's bleak jobs report shows that the economy is so far below its productive capacity that much more money will be needed.
This is still not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is a Depression. And the only way out is government spending on a very large scale. We should stop worrying about Wall Street. Worry about American workers. Use money to build up Main Street, and the future capacities of our workforce.
You remember Aretha Franklin's inauguration hat, right? That particular beauty is likely on its way to the Smithsonian, but you can buy your own version for $179 -- just in time for Easter.
If that's a little steep for you, the Religion News Service reports that milliners are offering refurbished Easter hats. They are taking "gently worn" donations, repairing them, adding new flair and then selling them cheap to cash-strapped patrons.
Kari posted this picture to our Flickr pool in January. She writes:
This photo was taken in Ukiah, CA, which is two hours north of San Francisco. We aren't having the severe housing collapse that other communities have had - but the evidence of the downturn is still quite visible all over town. Houses empty seemingly overnight, never-ending newspaper announcements about foreclosures, small businesses closing up suddenly. We are also having teacher layoffs and government worker furloughs though that is more the direct result of the current California budget catastrophe. Our local homeless center is under a lot of strain at the moment as well. It's the same story all over, I suppose.
Our colleague Jessica Goldstein sent in this photo of a Washington, D.C., diner trying to cash in on the stimulus thing. I don't think American City Diner is as powerful as the Fed, but the folks there are printing money...
Today I got this email from Peter Tirschwell, editor of the Journal of Commerce. Peter spends a lot of time at U.S. ports, but his latest visit to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach left him spooked. Spooked because it was quiet and calm. These ports handle 40 percent of all U.S. containers moving in international trade. Last February import volumes were down 43 percent from the same month last year. "43 percent!", Peter exclaims.
He writes:
The docks that make up port cargo terminals, where millions of steel containers full of freight are transferred, are normally a death-defying place to be. Even from the seeming safety of a vehicle, the pace of activity all around as yard-hustlers towing 40-foot boxes coming whipping around tall stacks of the containers and eight-story-tall cranes hoist the imposing-looking boxes directly over your head.
Forrest sends this picture and letter from San Francisco. He writes:
At the gym, people are talking about having to get to spin class at least 15 min. before it starts to get a bike when the classes used to be half full. These are midday classes, during the week. People continue to chatter about layoffs, but most of us do freelance work. We still have jobs but no work to speak of. We all try to keep busy at the gym. It's the best we've looked in years.
We've been getting lots of great comments and questions about how the FDIC seizes failed banks. This weekend we'll get deeper into that process on This American Life, and next week we'll get to some of your questions on the depleting Deposit Insurance Fund.
Today being Friday and all, I am sitting here waiting to see if and where banks will fall. If you check the failed bank list obsessively like me (please don't) you'll start to see some states showing up a lot. Georgia makes the list 8 times in the past 7 months. No other state has seen that many failures since September. Like the Bank of Clark County (from our story), community banks in Georgia got big into the housing and development boom. They rode the wave of profits and now it's coming to an end.
I work for a fortune 500 Company in the financial sector, and today when I went to the break room to get a cup and some ice for the drinks I keep in my office, I notice the cups had changed. Before we had these nice 20oz cups with the company name on them, that had the weird texture on the outside to make sure coffee does not burn your hand, or condensation does not build on the outside, and in return get on your papers on your desk. Today we have Solo cups, you know the red cups that every person that has ever gone to college knows about.
This confused me; the stock market jumped up yesterday, just as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner laid out plans for much tighter regulation of Wall Street.
I'm sure there is a more sensible explanation, but I kept thinking how parenting books say kids secretly crave rules and discipline.
I think we really scared ourselves with this crisis.
The Virgin Megastore in New York's Times Square. Jacob Ganz
I walked by the almost-shuttered Virgin Megastore in Times Square today, which is in the process of counting down its last four days until it closes to become a clothing store for teenagers. When Virgin closes its Union Square Megastore in May, it will leave New York City without a major record store, as far as I can tell.
The death of the record store is an over-covered event, but I couldn't help getting a little pang of sadness when I walked by the store. When was the last time a major industry's format change actually altered the physical marketplace? Trolley cars?
We mentioned on the podcast that former Fed chairman Paul Volcker will be leading the Obama administration's effort to reform the tax code. Volcker is widely credited with getting the country out of the stagflation mess of the 1970s.
I heard him speak briefly this week at a conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal, on how regulation should change.
I was surprised to hear Volcker (who heads the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board) argue that we should go slow on reform. Especially given that Obama and democratic leaders are pushing for quick action.
Here's tape of what he said. That's Alan Murray, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, who tells the amusing anecdote at the beginning.
(Weird reporter diary note: For some reason journalists were taken into the room through a back route that led through the hotel kitchen. It was kind of like that scene in the movie Swingers.)
Over the past couple of days, I've noticed the Washington Mutuals in San Francisco slowly becoming Chases instead. I was in one yesterday that had completely replaced all its signs but still had WaMu deposit slips and the like. Today I caught the sign dismantling in action in the Financial District, as seen by this sad WaMu cube sitting in a dumpster.
We've had a lot of discussion on the blog recently about bonuses. Today Andrew writes to ask: "what's the big deal?"
I feel like either the whole country is nuts, or I am crazy. I see no ethical, moral, or legal reason that the bonus promised to these AIG employees should not be paid. Every justification I have heard expressed is gibberish.
John Konrad says demand for gold is way up. Chana Joffe-Walt/NPR
I stopped by this coin shop in downtown Seattle the other day and met John Konrad. He sells stamps and collectibles but really, Konrad is in it for the love of money. "Real money," he tells me, not that fiat paper stuff you probably think of as money. He's talking about gold.
Konrad says he has never seen demand for gold like this before. He can't get his hands on enough. Customers want to stock up. In normal times at the Stamp and Coin Shop, it's a wait of a day or two for big order. Now it's weeks and Konrad is reluctantly turning business away.
Even young people, he exclaims (defined by Konrad as under 50 years-old), are coming in and asking for gold!
There was some good news for the battle-scarred housing market today. Sales of previously owned homes shot up over five percent in January, according to the National Association of Realtors. In a statement released this morning, Lawrence Yun chief economist for the NAR credited the jump to bargain hunting first time buyers:
Because entry level buyers are shopping for bargains, distressed sales accounted for 40 to 45 percent of transactions in February. Our analysis shows that distressed homes typically are selling for 20 percent less than the normal market price, and this naturally is drawing down the overall median price.
The NAR says home prices have fallen sharply this year. The national median existing-home price for all housing was $165,400 in February, down 15.5 percent from a year ago. With prices continuing to fall, the outlook for home sales looks good.
I was at our credit union the other day and one of the employees (I think the manager) told us a story that reflects these hard economic times. He said that in San Francisco there is a bank that saw a huge increase in the amount of coins coming in. Apparently, people were breaking their piggy banks and raiding their coin bottles to turn in at the bank. In fact, the volume got so large that the bank had to bring in truck trailers to put the coins.
Guy #1: I agree they should take back the AIG bonuses. But they should also take back the salaries of the people at the Securities and Exchange Commission. And Alan Greenspan's salary....
Guy #2: I don't care about the bonuses. I really don't. Maybe because I don't care about money in general. But I just don't feel any moral outrage. And who knows, maybe some of those guys getting bonuses were just doing their jobs, you know 'hey guy: analyze this thing for me' Were they all really in a position to know? You can't blame someone unless they should have known. I'm sure the government's going to get its money back eventually. So who cares?
Across the street from the AIG offices on Wall St. Caitlin Kenney/NPR
According to the folks behind the website Take Back the Economy, today is a national day of action to demand "more responsible corporate behavior" and "employee free choice and healthcare reform." In New York, that meant a couple hundred protesters chanting and holding signs in front of the offices of Goldman Sachs and AIG.
Caitlin Kenney and I made the trip down from Planet Money HQ in Midtown to check out the action.
40 cent store at Ithaca Commons. Randy Philipp/Planet Money Facebook group
More evidence of tough times everywhere. We've been asking for your photos of the recession, and the responses have been amazing. The Boston Globe got in on the action yesterday with a photo gallery that shows foreclosures, closed ports, empty stores and stalled building projects.
It's rough out there. Keep those pictures rolling in.
Steve Rhodes sends these photos from the last days of Stacey's Bookstore in San Francisco. The store closed yesterday after 85 years in business and 50 years in the same location. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the closure earlier this month:
Stacey's was always crowded at lunch hour. It was a place to sit, to ask the clerks for advice, or just to look at books. "You know, people don't think of the Financial District as a neighborhood, but it is," said Ingrid Nystrom, the marketing manager at Stacey's, who has run 50 to 100 author events a year there over the past 11 years. "It will be a real loss to the neighborhood. We've had some people crying."
Stacey's had a lot of books on financial topics, and the numbers for the store were grim, Nystrom said. "We sold $4.5 million worth of books last year," she said. "But the place (three stories and a basement) is too big for the number of people."
My colleague Joe Palca has the following proposal:
Here's what you do. Announce that the money will be handed out at a public function. Then, print the checks on those oversize posters like they do for the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, so you can see the name of the lucky winner and the amount they received from 100 yards away. Anyone who wants the money has to come up on stage and have his or her picture taken with an irate Timothy Geithner.
I'm guessing many would decide it wasn't worth it. And for those who do, well, at least they'll have provided us with a little entertainment.
Adam and Alex and I spent the day running around Capitol Hill, trying to document what could be the most sweeping regulatory reform efforts the banking industry has seen since the great depression.
The House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on Systemic Risk and how to make sure a future crisis doesn't cascade the way this one has. Barney Frank is hoping to get some sort of major regulatory reform package together in very short order.
Richard spotted this sign at the liquor store in Oregon:
I thought I heard that the liquor industry did well in hard times. Not that simple, I guess. Anyway, it's a regulated industry, and the state is hurting, so there are ripple effects, and it looks like it hit the local liquor store in a big way. They're also talking about a higher beer tax, here in Beervana.
Time to break out the moonshine stills?
The Oregonian reports that state lawmakers cut liquor store commissions to help balance the state budget.
Economic Indicator: 9. Nine months was the amount of time that the new pizza place down the street stayed open. They moved from a really bad location a couple of miles away to a nicer location close to central down-town Colorado Springs. They completely renovated a space and installed all brand new equipment and furnishings. Did everything they could to make it look like a nice new up-scale pizza place. But it never looked like they had much business when I would walk by at lunch time.
The empty walls of the London Underground. Gareth Jones
Gareth sends this photo of a Tube station in London, noting that it's "usually full of advertising."
Send your photos and economic indicators to planetmoney@npr.org or add them to our Facebook group.
UPDATE: A listener from London reports that that several Underground stations were poster-free for a few days, but it was not due to a lack of advertising spending. Many stations are undergoing a complete face lift, and after a few days of remodeling the paper posters were replaced with large video screens. Maybe this is a good news indicator after all.
Dante Hesse, organic dairy farmer, needs to raise $700,000. NPR
A bunch of you have been asking about economic growth and sustainability. Today on All Things Considered, we hear from an organic dairy farmer who has turned to his customers for help financing a bottling plant in his barn.
You can read an excerpt from his book with the story. Here's a nugget from Tasch:
Organized from "markets down" rather than from "the ground up," industrial finance is inherently limited in its ability to nurture the long-term health of community and bioregion. These limits are nowhere more apparent than in the food sector, where financial strategies optimizing the efficient use of capital have resulted in cheap chemical-laden food, depleted and eutrophied aquifers, millions of acres of GMO corn, trillions of food miles, widespread degradation of soil fertility, a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and obesity epidemics side by side with persistent hunger.
Earlier this week, Jennifer Klein of Jacksonville noticed a sign in a highway median that read, "Tenant Evictions. No Mess. Cheap $$$. Pay With Credit Card."
By the time she went back to take a picture, the sign was gone. Turns out it was for JaxEvictions, a service of Hetsler Mediation and Valuation, Inc. Look, someone's gotta kick those people out, right? Says the website:
"You could pay a lawyer over $1,000 for an eviction, but our prices START AT ONLY $350."
The news reports that Citigroup closed up 38% today made things seem maybe better than they are. Shares are still worth less than a cup of coffee, because 38% of a small number is still a small number.
Percentages are a fine way to report things for small jumps up and down. But if a stock has dropped 98% from its peak (like Citi has) then even a 98% jump doesn't get you back anywhere close to where you started. (You'd still be out 96 cents on the dollar.)
I dunno, these are strange times. The usual rules of how we report things kind of don't apply.
Some of my former physics colleagues have taken their skills to the world of finance over the years. I think they were surprised there wasn't more math on Wall Street, but also wary of how useful that math would be.
This quote kind of sums things up:
"In physics there may one day be a Theory of Everything; in finance and the social sciences, you're lucky if there is a useable theory of anything."
Seen in DUMBO, Brooklyn Joel Cook/ Planet Money Flickr pool
When he got laid off years ago, Mike Tharp, now a columnist at the Merced Sun-Star (h/t Romenesko), says his prescription for getting back on his feet was two-fold:
On today's podcast, we'll hear from an intern architect who's taking his time to study up for the licensing exam. Me, I've had to go looking for new work a few times, each one a different adventure.
Benet Wilson posted this indicator to the Planet Money Facebook group:
I am on the email blast list for Icelandair, even though they don't fly out of Baltimore anymore. Considering Iceland's contribution to the global economic meltdown -- which I learned about on Planet Money -- I found their latest blast most interesting. They are trying to spur travel to their bankrupt country by offering a "Stimulus Package."
Surest sign of recession: our Admissions staff reports that it's raining men. Culturally, we aren't entirely prepared for this. Just out of curiosity, over the last week and a half I've been keeping informal track of the gender breakdown at the meetings I've had. In every group of ten or more, the men are outnumbered, usually by at least two to one.
Ford Motor Company has said it doesn't need loans from the government.
But that doesn't mean all is well. The company is offering to pay off some of its bonds. But people who bought those bonds won't be getting back anything like the full face value.
Here's the table detailing the offer. In most cases it amounts to 27 cents on the dollar.
An empty mall in Warwick, RI. Robert Hart/Planet Money Facebook Group
Robert Hart sends this picture of the Rhode Island Mall in Warwick. He writes:
My local mall in Rhode Island, which I haven't visted in about a year, has only five stores left in it. I was talking to the employees in several stores and they all thanked me for stopping by. I saw many vacant storefronts with signs saying, closing in Feb 2009 which were vacant. There is a Sears that has everything on sale, a Walmart and a Kohl's left. I think it was in decline due to Providence Place Mall, but this recession is killing it. Walking inside felt almost post apocalyptic, it was scary.
Dale sends this picture of Hummer dealership in Lisle, IL. He writes:
A friend of mine goes to the Dodge dealer next door and stopped in for a repair. Apparently the shop has the only Hummers, but they can't get parts to repair them. The story is that the owner of both the Dodge & Hummer dealers has all but shutdown the Hummer side. Since he does not have a GM brand dealer he owns, he cannot get parts from GM (I presume they're not shipping anything to him as he hasn't ordered any Hummers). I'm left wondering if he sold off the inventory to individuals or another dealer?
Inspired by Friday's indicator from architect Celeste Lewis, Jon from Southern California sends one of his own:
My wife runs a small wedding and event coordinating business in Southern California. We would annually spend about $5-10K for marketing efforts, including last year and we would typically do 4-6 weddings at least a year, with a budget range of $35-85k.
For us, it started to slow down last summer, we went from 2-4 inquiries a month, to maybe one legitimate inquiry or referral by September. (an average year would see 25-35 inquiries, and 4-6 bookings). Since the first of October, her company has not had a single inquiry for full wedding coordination (where she works on the project for 6 months to a year doing pretty much everything for the client), which is really what her business specializes in.
Russ Roberts is no fan of the Obama administration's economic policies. The George Mason professor and Planet Money guest says the stimulus is an outsize answer to a recession with employment still below 8 percent. He says the government ought to let some of the faltering banks fail.
And when he looks at the particulars of the $787 billion stimulus plan, he notes one provision that strikes him as deeply, deeply wrong: an $8,000 tax credit for home buyers. On his blog, Cafe Hayek, Roberts headlined his objection "They never learn."
"This is unbelievable," he told me. "It's like, 'We got into this problem by trying to let people buy houses they couldn't afford -- let's keep it going!' It's an extraordinary thing."
In a report for Morning Edition, our own Chana Joffe-Walt traces the austere history -- and anxiety-inducing present -- of four words you'll all recognize:
Do more with less.
We're all hearing that catchphrase these days, the lucky ones of us who are still working after colleagues have been laid off. Joffe-Walt finds that do more with less goes all the way back to America's early days.
Kalun Lee sends this image from Boston. She writes:
This is a picture I took yesterday of the One Franklin development in the Downtown Crossing neigborhood of Boston. The empty space that you see is what used to be Filene's and Filene's Basement department stores. Filene's Basement is where the "running of the Brides" originated. One Franklin was intended to have luxury condos, retail and offices when it broke ground early last year.
We've heard rumblings from some of you that businesses are using the economic crisis as cover for long-planned layoffs, salary freezes, etc. You've got company.
Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the guy who landed his US Airways plane safely in the Hudson River last month, just told the House aviation subcommittee that in recent years his pay has been slashed 40 percent and his pension terminated. AP reports that the cuts came after post-9/11 airline bankruptcies.
"The bankruptcies were used by some as a fishing expedition to get what they could not get in normal times," Sullenberger said.
In a podcast from mid-January you made a comment about going to a "village somewhere in the Amazon" to find someone who hadn't heard of a subprime mortgage. Well, we were there last week, in the Ecuadorian Amazon basin on the Rio Napo. I asked around. True, no one seemed to know exactly why the U.S. economy had crumpled and taken the rest of the world with it. Even the generic concept of a mortgage seemed unfamiliar to many, not to mention a subprime one.
A friend of mine, freelance writer Erik Baard, stumbled into the story of Bernie Madoff trading records blowing in the wind -- literally.
Erik turned it into a New Yorker Talk of the Town (freelancers, you'll know why this could also fit in our Green Shoots category). He reports that papers were flying all over his Queens neighorhood:
The trades may be fictitious; investigators suspect that Madoff never executed many of the trades that he'd claimed he was making. When you see the slips now, each with the information filled in as if by an electric typewriter, you begin to appreciate how much scut work a fraud of this magnitude would have required. For Madoff to have pulled it off himself, you can imagine that he would have had to fill out fake slips day and night, or to have deployed a Ponzi robot.
Barbara Baldwin added this picture from Mardi Gras to our Flickr pool. She writes:
The Krewe d'Etat throws a satirical parade - the theme of the parade this year was "The Dictator goes to Broadway", but the economy was a big part of the parade. The title of this float was "Brother Can you Spare a Trillion?" Here's a close up of the top of the float - the fat cats are parachuting, and there's 70 trillion flowing out of a bucket.
Keith Elder lives in Hattiesburg, Miss., and works as a software engineer for an online mortgage broker. Last week, he was driving home from Little Rock, Ark., when he spotted a sign by the side of the road.
"Pre Depression Price Sale," it read. Keith hit the brakes and went back to take a picture, then blogged about it and posted it to Flickr. Since then, more than 130,000 people have seen the image. Yesterday, he told us why he just had to turn around.
We at Planet Money have been trying to find ways to explain what banks do.
And I realized one reason it's hard is that the only time most people get to play bank is in the game Monopoly. And that is just such a lousy lousy example.
The bank in monopoly is basically a cash register. It doesn't take in deposits, it has no regulator.
On Valentine's Day my wife and I embarked on what felt like a personal stimulus package. We used up some gift cards left over from our wedding three years ago. (OK, we also worried some of the companies might go bankrupt.)
But of course it doesn't help the stores. They took the money on their FY 2005 balance sheets when the cards were bought.
I was recently wandering around one of the most expensive neighborhoods in all of Stockholm - Östermalmstorg. The area is populated by diplomats and foreign dignitaries. Young, new money. Little old ladies in fur coats with their old money. It is the place to be if you have money and want to live in the middle of town. It is quite the place on so many different levels.
It wasn't the population that caught my attention though, but a temporary sign hanging in a jewelry shop: "Tanguld köpes." Translated it means "Tooth gold purchased."
If you're eager for financial dramas, you got two options right now.
1) The film "The International" (Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, and a preposterous plot.) Our own Adam Davidson went and got an economist to review it for us, which we'll have for you shortly.
2) Tonight CNBC will run a two-hour special called "Collapse" described as "the definitive report on the defining story of our time."
Firewood for sale, but not moving, outside Nashville.
Andrew Visser
Awhile back, a listener named Andrew Visser wrote in from the Nashville area to say he'd noticed a lot of new folks selling firewood from pickups by the side of the road. Andrew said he'd stop by and ask if the newcomers were searching for extra cash in the recession.
Andrew talked to two of them. He reports:
I talked to Jack and Mike. Jack told me he has been selling firewood to make ends meet since he lost his job about 3 months ago, the indefinite lay-off. He said he drives from 45 minutes away to the location (just outside downtown Nashville) to sell his goods. Mike drives from 45 miles out to get here, and has been doing this business for 5-6 years. He (Mike) was selling firewood for the same reasons. No job. He told me that there were a lot of people selling firewood here this year as compared to previous seasons.
I have an indicator for you. While flying over Singapore's southern port area I noticed hundreds of ships at anchor in the straight. Over dinner, me and some friends hypothesized about why so many vessels, the heavy hitters in commercial transport, are sitting idly near the largest port in the world. We figured they couldn't be just waiting for a spot; such inefficiency would doubtful be visible in a port which moves more volume than any other. The most logical conclusion we could come up with (which isn't saying much) is that they're just on a layover--if you will--enjoying the night life of Singapore before they move on to their next port.
Donald Trump wants you to jump into the crazy real estate market. Actually he wants you to take his class. Well, it's not his class -- it's taught by "Donald Trump's handpicked instructor." The pitch:
"We'll help you by teaching you how to profit from the $700 billion bailout"
The ad, which ran in the Baltimore Sun, doesn't mention how much the full course costs. The (unnamed) instructor is in town this week.
Here's an indicator for you: $1.65. That's the cost of procuring a small coffee at the Harvard Barker Center after the recession made it "impossible" for Harvard to pay for free coffee for faculty or students.
Remember the Wisconsin school districts that were horrified to learn they had invested $200 million in what are now toxic assets? The latest twist is that they are asking lawmakers for TARP money.
The husband and I got one of those rare things -- a childless night on Friday. We live outside of Baltimore and decided to do dinner at a casual dining establishment. I didn't think we'd have any problem getting in, considering how everyone is allegedly cutting back on things like dinner out.
First, we went to Red Robin, where there was an hour wait and the bar was packed. We drove over to Glory Days Grill - same thing. We ended up snagging 2 seats at the bar at a completely full Applebee's. I chatted with the manager and he said they have actually seen business increase since the holidays. They have some value items and specials on the menu, which he said has helped. Who knew??
Our colleague, David Folkenflik, had a piece on Morning Edition today about what happens to a town when its newspaper shuts down. The future of the media is something we've gotten a lot of questions about and we've looked at the economic angle on the podcast. Folkenflik's story takes a different approach, with a look at the changing way we get our news.
"You lose a sense of community," Pazniokas says. "If everybody is looking at dozens or hundreds of different news sources, you don't have the common point of reference that -- not to be corny -- [is] an important part of democracy and community."
Chris Neary checks in from Chicago with this picture of an empty storefront in his neighborhood. He writes:
It's been empty for months.
The weird thing about this empty store front, as you can see, is that the building owner, Realty & Mortgage Co. is making suggestions about what kind of business you might want to start in this spot.
Maybe you heard about Denny's restaurants giving away free Grand Slam breakfasts today.
Well, my husband and I thought we'd try them for lunch, but there was a long line of people already there, waiting in the snow to get in. We had no desire to join them, but we were already psyched for a lunch out, so we ended up at our local diner, buying a restaurant meal we wouldn't have otherwise. I heard one of the waitresses comment that it was unusually busy for a Tuesday--it made me wonder how many other people went out for meals elsewhere, rather than going home, if they couldn't get into Denny's.
A course catalog from NYU's School of Continuing & Professional Studies came to my house the other day, and the classes offered for career planning really caught my eye. Notice a theme here?
Michael Rothberg sends this indicator, a Craigslist ad from New York City. Headline: "I Will Work for Free!! (Project Manager / Project Architect)."
The ad touts five years of experience with computer-assisted design. And that's not all. "I will work for you for free!" JP writes. "If after 4 weeks you are not completely convinced that I am a great asset to your company you can simply tell me to leave. However, if after 4 weeks you appreciate my hard work, industry knowledge and experience then we will talk about a full time position. It is basically a win-win situation for the both of us."
I am on the college recruiting team for a large manufacturing company in the Midwest. Last Tuesday, I staffed my company's booth at Iowa State University's spring engineering career fair.
I met a very charismatic student with an impressive resume: Suma Cum Laude with a 3.98 GPA in engineering.
We've been hearing from some of you that you're trying to save more, that you're either tired of what feels like over-consumption or that you want to hunker down in case you lose your jobs.
Others of you tell us that you've decided to spend a little more, here and there, to help a local business or to prop up the economy in general.
That debate plays out in the slideshow above, with ad campaigns from the U.S. and Finland.
What we keep asking ourselves at Planet Money is not just how we're changing our spending/saving habits, but whether those changes will last. Hit the comments, please.
They say that when your friend loses his job, it's an economic slowdown. When you lose your job, it's a recession. And when an economist loses his job, it's a depression. By that logic, this economic crisis just became my Waterloo.
As someone lucky enough to be gainfully employed, I have watched this great unraveling with anger at those responsible, sympathy for those less fortunate and concern for us all. But it hadn't fully hit home. Until now.
That's because the Super Bowl is this Sunday, and there's a SHORTAGE OF BUFFALO WINGS IN AMERICA. That's like Wimbledon running out of strawberries and cream, or the French Open running out of contempt.
Cormac Eubanks sends one of my favorite indicators to date -- the team names from his local pub trivia game. He writes:
I live in San Francisco and the Bay Area had been considered somewhat insulated from the downturn as Silicon Valley is less dependent on the traditional banking system than it is from small private investors. Recently though the stories of friends being laid off at companies large and small have become more numerous. Here's an interesting indicator of how the trend is beginning to settle in even here. At a pub quiz last night at the Edinburgh Castle, 3 of the 10 team names in the bar were:
- "8,000 Sprint Employees Now Have Free Daytime Minutes"
- "I Was Told There Would Be Cake in the Breakroom and Instead They Laid Us Off"
Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X, has an op-ed for everyone who thinks the world the world as we know it is coming to an end. I'm not endorsing it. I just thought you'd want to see it.
How much less will we actually consume in 2009? Does the prospect of a 10 percent reduction in personal spending sound scary? Should we be figuring out a number in our heads we can agree on as being both plausible and survivable? Five percent? Eight? When do we say, "O.K., this kind of reminds me of 'The Waltons' and I can feel good about it"?
He gets to that off-the-edge-of-the-horizon thing toward the end.
The Alphaville blog of the Financial Timesposted a JP Morgan image showing the rapidly shrinking market values of major banks. Commenters immediately pointed out that the graph used diameter, rather than area (the square of half of the diameter, times pi), which made JP Morgan look better than it should. Below the jump, a couple variations on this theme.
Last week, we learned that housing starts for December fell to their lowest level ever. Flickr user Sadicarnot sends this picture of a house that got started but never finished. He writes:
This house is on the Indian River Lagoon in Brevard County FL. The houses on this street were going for a minimum of $1m. This house was gutted but no work went on for several months, the assumption was they were waiting for permits.
They began working just before the summer of '08 but work stopped sometime during the summer. They didn't shingle the roof, what they did do will probably just rot away.
The folks at High Frequency Economics noted this week that the perception of deflation creates deflation. Listener David Melito seconds that, in an e-mail with the subject line "My Mother's Hallway Mirror." He writes:
I was chatting with my mother the other day and she said to me that she had her eye on a hallway mirror at [deleted]. She said "I know that they are about to declare bankruptcy so I am waiting for the clearance sale. You have to wait awhile for them to really cut the prices."
It got me to thinking if my mother is buying a hallway mirror from a company that is going out of business. That means she is NOT giving money to a company that is trying to stay in in business. She can't be the only person making these types of decisions.
Universities around the country are bracing for massive cuts as states rethink their shrinking budgets. In preparation for expected budget cuts, many are asking their staffs to look for any way to save money.
I suppose that this is nothing new at this point, but the pace of small-business closures seems to be picking up in the Seattle area. Furniture stores are hard-hit, as they seemed to have developed a reliance on people purchasing new furnishings for new homes that they were moving into, but I've also encountered an ethnic-gifts store and a hobby store that are going (or have gone) belly-up.
Planet money indicator - Sweaters. My child goes to private school in Manhattan. When he first started kindergarten only the mothers were dropping the kids off, or dads in suits. As the semester progressed I have noticed a sharp rise in the casual sweater wearing male. I am guessing that a lot of private schools are going to have a hard time holding on to a portion of their students.
A while back, we blogged about how the plunging Baltic Dry Index (BDI) reflects the dramatic slowdown in international shipping. Today's bleak number is zero -- the cost to ship containers in Asia and Europe. Yes, you're reading this right, you can send your containerized products (such as the BBC's Box) for absolutely nothing on certain key routes.
We have no podcast today, now that we're on our Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule, but we do have this economic indicator for you. Back in December, Cassi Yost sent us the above photograph of her local mall in Cleveland, Tenn. At the time she wrote:
Our local mall on a Saturday about 6pm ... food kiosks have closed and spaces are for lease. Barely anyone shopping, and virtually no one eating at the single food vendor. This could spell the end of our only shopping mall here in Cleveland, Tenn. -- we may be forced to head to Chattanooga or Knoxville in days to come.
Today Cassi sends this update -- the mall has entered receivership. The local paper has this quote from the receiver, which is operating the mall now:
"Our leasing and management teams are fully engaged in assessing the mall and its needs," said Greg Maloney, president and chief executive of Jones Lang LaSalle Retail. "The mall is open for business, and we welcome the entire community to come and shop."
Hiland Hall shares this letter from his hometown newspaper on the coast of Maine. It's an open letter from the CEO of the local hospital in which he lays out their dire financial situation. Hall points to this line, one he says he's been seeing a lot lately: "Part of our problem is in the mirror; our culture has not been one that forced us to run a tight financial ship because we always had our pool of investments in the past to bail us out."
Ed Park, a novelist and former colleague of mine, blogs today in the New York Times about the idea of a personal layoff narrative. Park writes:
You step outside your office building for the last time, and instead of a wayward beam of sun warming your face, you see boarded-up windows all along the block, and the box in which you've packed your major cubicle possessions -- Rolodex, spider plant, reams of something having to do with your 401(k) -- is about to fall apart.
On today's podcast, we'll hear from a worker who barely saw it coming.
A Twitter friend of mine sends this news clip. It's about her former employer in Ohio, which sent the workers an e-mail over New Year's saying that it was closing and everyone was out of a job. The reporter in this story questions whether the company, a publisher, gave employees the legally required notice.
After the jump, a series of messages she sent over Twitter.
Sean K. sent us a story from a Grand Rapids, Michigan, paper about the terrible lines in the unemployment office. The story is great, but what really struck me was the picture.
(Anybody out there dealing with long lines? We'd love to hear from you.)
During holiday dinner conversations the crisis of the economy was of course a topic, and while one friend (who works for FIAT) told us about the problems in his sector of the economy, another friend told us the opposite.
The man is working for a famous chocolate maker . . . and he told us that since the crisis started sales are up 5-6%. Apparently it's a well known fact in the chocolate industry, that when times are bad, people tend to comfort their souls with affordable treats.
I know the feeling. I've got a bowl of candy sitting on my desk right now.
I work in the field of water and wastewater infrastructure construction, repair, and maintenance in Minnesota.
Concrete products (pipe, precast manholes, etc) here are 50% of their 2007 costs. HALF PRICE. Other material (plastic and ductile iron pipe, for example) costs are falling too. This is due to lack of demand and the manufacturers are trying to cover their overhead. There is the potential for a bargain if water and sewer is part of the next bailo- er, stimulus package.
Meanwhile, Claire in Northern California reports that her husband's talking about a possible pay cut. She says the same thing we always say at my house -- break out the rice and beans.
Pam Olson sends this "3 Suits for the Price of 1!" ad from Centerville, Ohio. Pam says:
Look what came in the mail last weekend! Thought you might want to add this to your list of indicators. If you had a job, a job where you needed to wear a suit, these deflationary times have got you covered!
With economists expecting really, really bad numbers on job losses this week, Hyundai's offering a deal: Buy or lease a car, and if you lose your income, the dealership will take the car back.
Among the asterisks: The offer's good for up to $7,500 of what you owe.
I've had this question the last few weeks: will this crisis give birth to some new way of thinking about economics?
The Great Depression begat Keynesianism, the crisis of the 1970s/1980s gave broader support to Friedmanism. So, will this crisis give birth to some new theory? Or are we just going to keep refining the big ideas we already have.
I had a great talk with Daron Acemoglu, a big-shot young economist about this. He says that yes, certainly, there will likely be radical new ideas.
It appears someone is trying to teach Bernie Madoff a lesson.
The Palm Beach Post is reporting that thieves who took a $10,000 statue from Madoff's home have dropped off the item along with a note at the Palm Beach Country Club where Madoff was a member.
The note attached to the statue of two lifeguards reads:
Bernie the Swindler, Lesson: Return Stolen Property to rightful owners. Signed by - The Educators.
The Palm Beach Post notes that in the Edukators, a 2004 German film, activists protest capitalism by breaking into the rich people's homes, moving around the furniture and leaving notes that warn, "The days of plenty are over."
Photos from Planet Money listeners and NPR staff (Flickr and Facebook)
Editor's note: This item has been updated and reposted. The Planet Money podcast returns on Friday, Jan. 2.
What a year, right? Planet Money launched on Sept. 7, 2008, just as the federal government unveiled plans for taking over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But never mind four months of crisis.
The National Bureau of Economic Research now says we've been living through a recession since December 2007. I'm trying to remember the moment when I first got worried, when things didn't feel right. I still think it was the day this fall when I took two apples out for family breakfast instead of the usual three -- even though our household income was essentially unchanged.
Drop your own first hints of trouble in the comments, please.
I spent the two weeks before Christmas traveling through Egypt, which is experiencing a sharp downturn in tourism. On a Nile cruise, our 128-cabin boat was only at about half capacity. Our tour guide, Hatem, told us he is working less and worries that it's only going to get worse. Hatem and his financee, also a tour guide, are even thinking of postponing their upcoming wedding.
Walt in Georgia sends a story about the drop in recycling. Dawson County had already suspended collection of glass and plastic. Now it's adding paperboard to the list. Companies are cutting their purchases of recycled material, so recycling centers can't use what consumers would usually bring in. (Bonus: Chana Joffe-Walt covers the West Coast scene.)
Meanwhile, Mitch in Oregon sends a story about $3.39 billion in bailout money for American Express. The company is converting itself into a bank. Mitch takes special note of this paragraph: "American Express Chief Financial Officer Daniel Henry said in October that that company had $24 billion of debt maturing over the next 12 months. While the lender would probably have been able to pay that off, gaining access to TARP removes any concern, said [analyst Richard] Shane."
Mitch writes, "Did American Express convert to a bank just to get a $3.39 billion gift from the TARP that they didn't even need?" Technical note: The Treasury's getting stock in the deal, so it's not, strictly speaking, a gift.
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