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United States

Jobs, leverage & the future: Thoughts about the challenges of an economic hard place

January 25, 2010

Sometimes a confluence of unrelated inputs adjusts one’s perception of current and future circumstance. The adjustment doesn’t always have a re-orienting impact; often, it is more notable for confirming and strengthening a point of view.
At the end of last week, I shared a summary of Bloomberg headlines that seemed to capture a pirouette in [...]

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8 headlines that capture this week’s abrupt shift in political discourse, market focus and consumer trends

January 21, 2010

This has the feel of a big week. The headlines that clicked by on Bloomberg today captured a different zeitgeist than last week, a sense of a logjam of rhetoric and disconnection break open.
Commentators will have a field day, but it’s worth taking a look at how the rhythm of the news shifted.
Here’s the [...]

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The change in consumer consumption reflects a long-term shift in U.S. demographics related to aging

January 18, 2010

Here’s an underlying issue for a consumer-driven economy: a change in demographics will reduce the volume of consumer spending.
From Nielsen’s research blog:
CPG Spending Declines
As population growth slows in the U.S., so will spending on consumer products. Household size will decline across the board, the largest families will be smaller and a large share of [...]

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Frick & Frack ruminate & give us a lesson on the present day nature of political discourse

January 18, 2010

“If necessity knows no law, then neither does power”
I’ve been musing over the state of our national discourse a lot recently.
The stakes of our socioeconomic quandary feel very stark. Mountains of debt and millions of unemployed putting pressure on a systems of goods, services and production that looks like what philosophers call a self-contained [...]

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Two tables that put the mobile Internet in perspective: BIG!

January 8, 2010

Here’s two tables, courtesy of eMarketer, that put Mobile in perspective. Big perspective, that is.
The first shows Morgan Stanley’s outlook on the growth internet-enabled mobile devices, which the firm says will grow 120% in the next four years.
That growth is driven by a high-level of consumer desire. Pew Research released a study that [...]

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Looking at some long-term trends in the employment numbers

January 8, 2010

A new data point emerged in the reporting on the job figures today: the employment population ratio. The metric a fairly absolute measuring stick: What percentage of the people in the United States, of any age, are employed at anyone time.
One version of the data is presented below in a chart from [...]

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The rental industry continues its downturn, driven by a weak labor market, new reports show

January 7, 2010

If you’re in the multi-family industry and are looking for some signs of hope, today’s release from REIS Inc. wasn’t very helpful.
Reuters reported on REIS’s newest look at market conditions:
The U.S. apartment vacancy rate rose to an almost 30-year high of 8 percent in the fourth quarter, and rents dropped in the biggest one-year slump [...]

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