On the Road Again: Flash Car Lot

So yesterday I went down to my boss's place, a horse ranch south and east of here, past Ravensdale. The drive is through the leading edge of the development wave, so you have malls and subdivision giving way to scattered farms and new development giving way to lumbered areas, watershed, and gravel pits (sign in front of one of the nearby houses declared "400 trips a day is too much", which I think is a reference to the heavy trucks on the road.

But the thing I noticed on the way down on a Saturday morning was the impromptu car lots that have sprung up wherever there are clear spots along the side of the road. I first noticed one of these out on the peninsula, across the street from one of the casinos, about a dozen vehicles, parted diagonally, backed-in, to show off their profiles. At the time I made obvious conclusion that the cars were for sale by unsuccessful dice players. Now I'm seeing them a lot more of these Saturday morning car lots, and a lot closer. The cars are all for sale by owner, apparently driven to a central location and parked there so your random drive-by shopper can find a whole mess of them at once.

I've been thinking that the area has been recovering from the latest recession, but the sudden blooming of these lots gives me second thoughts.

More later,

The Out-Of-Towner

I spent the last half of this past week in New York, amazingly sealed off from the rest of the world - this despite the fact that the seat back ahead of me on the plane out was equipped with a TV set (small charge for earphones - one more advantage to learning to read lips).

Anyway, I was pretty much in isolation for a few days, so I spent much of yesterday figuring out what happened while I was gone. Here's what happened.

- WaMu went under and was picked up by the government in the largest bank failure in history. The government then turned around and sold the banking end of the business to JPMorgan Chase. So your money is safe - its just been moved to another town, like your basketball team.
- It turns out we still have a president, who spoke the country on the dangers faced by the current economic situation, and asks that everyone open their hearts and wallets to an unsupervised money wallow on the behalf of Wall Street.
- Candidate McCain declared that in light of the crisis, he had to go back to Washington and suspend campaigning. Apparently when he went back to the capitol, he had to wear a name tag so they would recognize him.
- Apparently in announcing he would have to go back to Washington, but not leaving immediately, he cheesed off Dave Letterman. Not a good thing, that.
- And McCain wanted to cancel the debates in light of the fact that Republicans don't look so good right now. When it became clear that this was a bad idea, he flipped again.
- I'm not quite sure if he's running for president or not right now.
- McCain's VP choice apparently screwed up another interview and has been sent to be tutored by Prof. Henry Higgins, who has promised to turn her into a proper political candidate by the time of the Embassy Ball.
- Meanwhile, Obama was merely campaigning and talking to people, which as everyone knows, is bad television.
- The debates did occur, and either Obama won or it was a tie, depending on who you support. Then again, maybe the debates were not held, and they just ran a rerun of the Nixon/JFK debate, remastered for HDTV.
- There were debates for the Washington State Governor's race as well, in which both candidates told us what they would do about a deficit the state currently doesn't have. The big panic, however, is that we WILL have a massive shortfall soon, since most of our tax money comes from things like the Sales Tax, a regressive little monster that produces less funds in times when people stop buying things. Like, um, now.
- And while Washington State has been more insulated from the economic disasters in the rest of the county, the fall of WaMu has brought it to our doorstep. I'm starting to see "flash car lots" more now, on my return.
- And while all eyes have been on the fall of the Western Markets, the Chinese managed their first space-walk. And of all of the above, that may be the most important thing that's happened in the past week.

More later,

DOW Breaks 11,000

Judging our economic health by looking at the Dow Jones is like judging your personal health by feeling your forehead with the back of your hand. It really doesn’t tell much, but if you’ve been doing it long enough that it becomes habit.

Actually, looking around, I am still not so certain about inevitable recovery from the Great Intercession. The "flash used car lots" that were at most traffic lights have gone away, but now I am seeing the interchange homeless moving up Petrovitsky into the more rural areas. Used to be you had to be at major off-ramp to qualify a homeless person standing politely with a sign, now you have them increasingly in deepest suburbia. The most embarrassed one I saw was surrounded by people dressed like the plush-headed Statues of Liberty, pushing a tax preparation service. They were much more enthusiastic than he was.

In addition, gas out here was kissing 3 bucks a gallon out here even before the Anacortes explosion, and the superheated price seems to have become the "new normal". So look for it to continue to go up further.

On the other hand, the economy may be improving, because my commute is starting to suck again. It may have been hard times over the past two years, but the effect on the I-405 corridor traffic have been beneficial. Microsoft is hiring again, so traffic should clot up once more in the more affordable neighborhoods.

I suppose that looking at Wall Street for our general or personal economic health shows the lie in "trickle-down' theories - that if you help the bigs, then the improved economic conditions will help the smalls. In reality, the bigs have to be healthy for a while before stuff starts leaking down to the small fry. And at the first sign of economic adversity, the smaller and weaker members of the economy get thrown off the bus first. So the amount of time that the lower classes benefit from a rising economy tends to be shorter than that of the upper classes.

Still, I was enheartened by the snippet that the stocks leading this particular charge were companies like Alcoa and Caterpillar. You know, companies that actually make things, as opposed to just move around money. So we may be seeing a recovery after all.

But not you, at least not until after the bigs have finished their feeding.

More later,