It looks like people are really spending money freely, and malls are again packed with foot traffic. Are we hyping about this recession? I think say last 6-8 years we have a tendency to hype negative news, especially after Sep 11, 2001, I think now also we are hyping about this recession. As per comscore, this year cyber Monday was second heaviest sales on record. May be NBER come back probably on December 2009 to declare that we are not in recession since December 2008, because it took one year to find out that we are at recession since December 2007.
As of Stock market, it is going up and down like bi-polar disorder, with in minute’s changes from south to north. But clearly unemployment rate is soaring(mainly construction, manufacturing, finance) and house price is keep on plummeting, since both of these affecting people directly plus usual media’s negative hype, we are feeling more recession pain than reality. Sometimes I feel that this is the way it should be, we have to have some discipline with spending habit and reality check. In other words, people flying high 30000 feet above earth and thinking that is normal. But after coming down to earth (reality), feeling depressed and recession and all pain.
Greatest example is Google,where free 3 times food, free dental, free medical,free massage, free car wash, 20% free time for thinking, free laundry, free movie tickets, free weekend games ticket, free yoga, free meditation, free internet, free phone connection and free gas. Now the name of recession Google going to cut all and people is going to scream and complain about recession. I don’t know for how long they want to enjoy free stuff in a public traded company and high capitalist country and 97% of revenue still come from online ads. It is laughable and illogic.
But as a country this negative hype is not good. It creates reverse brain drain and reverse migrations. For example, during last recession in Silicon Valley, the same negative hype created some panic with in immigrants and they just left the country to Canada, Australia and to their own country. The major benedictory of this is India, because after the last recession, India boomed a lot because of available experienced returned Information Technology man power with fresh pool of youngsters. But this phenomenon was not well studied or documented.
