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I live in a well to do suburb of Pittsburgh and frequently get up to do grocery shopping when the stores are still being stocked by overnight staff. I have noticed that seemingly every time I go at that hour there have been people with seemingly everything they own in the back of their car. Where they go when the parking lots are full? I do not know. Do I think they’re just the automotive version of “Hoarders”? No. I know they are living in their car.

I've seen this myself. I've also seen and heard a lot of really sad stories over the last several years.

I think I came to the realization towards the end of 2006 that things were getting bad and that something was wrong. Around that time, a lot of folks and companies I know started really tightening their belts. I started noticing a change in some of my dealings with my customers in 2007-2008, and some folks that I know that have similar businesses were also noticing it. Companies that we were doing work for, we started seeing a lot of layoffs and there was a lot of tension in the air. Lots of people getting nervous about their jobs. Lots of companies coming back to us and telling us they had to cancel certain contracts or scale them way back.

I know that in 2008, the government announced that the recession had really started in 2007, but I think it started earlier. I can't give specifics for obvious reasons, but 2006-2007, I saw some major layoffs in companies I deal with, and these were layoffs in areas or in companies that should have been a lot healthier than they turned out to be. The layoffs weren't due to mismanagement or other poor business practices, they were clearly part of a larger pattern of problems.

I remember quite clearly, thanks to an old email I came across this morning, a friend of mine with a company who asked my help in finding work for some people he was laying off. This was in 2005. He had about 200 employees. He has always taken a long-term view of things, and something he noticed made him decide that he needed to let some people go back in 2005, and reduce some salaries and scale back on his facilities, or else in his view, he would have to take drastic measures within 5 years. He was close - he still had to take drastic measures in 2009, but the decisions he made in 2005 served him well for the most part. There was grumbling from those employees who kept their jobs in 2005 - some even quite and went elsewhere when he cut salaries then, but those who are still with him in 2011 are grateful as hell to still have solid jobs.

“I know that in 2008, the government announced that the recession had really started in 2007, but I think it started earlier.”

If the “Clinton economy” was still all it’s been cracked up to be in 2000, Gore would have demolished Bush. The fact is that there were already problems in the job market, as the “information superhighway” went online and starting sucking white-collar jobs out of the country. On 9/11 many lives were doubtlessly saved by the fact that the World Trade Center had a lot of vacancies; jobs were already leaving the financial district (either for NJ or Asia).

I finished school in the early nineties, and the economy at that point was bad enough to cost Bush I a second term. Fall of 2008 was just when it was decided that the media could finally report how bad things had become (to put Obama into the White House). Why not have a foreign communist tell Americans we’d been reduced to Red Chinese peasants?