Posted on 02/16/2009 11:01:03 PM PST by TigerLikesRooster
Economy Strains Under Weight of Unsold Items
By Annys Shin
Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, February 17, 2009; A01
The unsold cars and trucks piling up at dealerships and assembly lines as consumers cut back and auto companies scramble for federal aid are just one sign of a major problem hurting the economy and only likely to get worse.
The world is suddenly awash in almost everything: flat-panel televisions, bulldozers, Barbie dolls, strip malls, Burberry stores. Japan yesterday said its economy shrank at an 12.7 percent annual pace in the last three months of 2008 as global demand evaporated for Japanese cars and electronics. Business everywhere are scrambling to bring supply in line with demand.
Downsizing can be tricky, though. No one knows how much worse the economy will get, and while everyone waits for the recession to peter out, businesses are grappling with how to cut costs and survive without sabotaging their ability to grow when the economy picks up.
And there is a lot to cut.
"There is over-capacity in everything," from "retail to manufacturing to housing," said Richard Yamarone, chief economist at Argus Research. "If capacity is too large, you don't need that many people employed, which is another reason we're seeing such high job losses."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Ping!
The Age of Consumerism is over. Liberals saddened.
People are going back to family-value basics in the near future.
They don’t seem to be putting that much on sale, yet.. Or maybe I am not buying the extra-consumerstic crap, so I am not seeing it.
I have a very large change jar that’s almost full!
I’ll pay them $500.00 in quarters for a new car.
Well, maybe some nickels too.
Seems to me they got two choices:
Take what they can get or
Watch them rust away
And remember, their value is going down every hour. Cars need to be driven and have some miles on them or you can kiss the seals goodbye.
Stores were left with mountains of Valentines day stuff too. Tons of it.
The local Bryant dealer is shy one furnace as of yesterday. Doing my part.
It is also going to help further decrease GDP and employment going forward in the near to medium term.
I just got some cards and misc items for next year’s Valentines class parties. There was quite a bit left over at Wal-Mart.
In S. Korea, on-line computer game industry is doing quite well. People do not go out much for fear of spending money, and sit around at home. On-line computer game is cheap & handy way to pass time for many of these folks.
Recent survey showed that game users increased across all age groups, not just the young.
Cash them in and buy some REAL SILVER. You can get quite a bit for $500.
If there wasn’t so much government-created uncertainty in the economy right now, prices wouldn’t be so sticky downward. They’d be sticky, but not as sticky as they are now.
I see items like milk really coming down, but items like electronic media and consumer electronics, aren’t coming down at all.
That’s because Barry is always talking up the economy!
I wonder how those Obama “collector” coins are selling?
The Age of Consumerism is over. Liberals saddened.
People are going back to family-value basics in the near future
Trust me on this one, the pathologies that flow in with poverty and the dull hum of desperation have nothing to do with family values.
Not as well as the 0-Barry toilet paper.
Very similar headlines popped up in August, September, and October of 1929. The details are different today, but the big picture is pretty much the same. A highly productive workforce, driven to subsistence lifestyles through years of wage and salary depression, are desperately needed to now purchase stockpiling inventories of all the junk they produced. Hurry up and buy, so the investors, brokers, and government slugs can get back to their parties!
Idiots are in charge everywhere -- in government, corporations, Wall Street, government, academia, the press, government -- you name it, and the idiots are running it. Did I mention government?
When things get so out of whack that governments have to lay off employees, you know things have already been really, really bad out in the real world of humans for a long time.
The whole economy consumption economy is built on wasteful spending...how are we going to pull out of this?
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