Don't need to tell anyone but
 

This economy sucks ass !

Tell me about it! I'm out on my ass this week from the second retail management job in five five months due to my stores closing out from underneath me.

I refuse to acknowledge that either is in any way my fault! :cool:

Yep. Orders are down at my plant. Waaaay down. Right now we should be running 14 lines 24/7. We usually ramp up in March and go balls out through September. (We make pvc and composite fence, rail, and deck)
We have been running 5 or 6 lines, and the plant manager, HR manager, and dept heads have been having some pretty suspicious looking secret meetings as of late up in the large conference room. I'm starting to get a little bit worried that this just might be our last season.

Things are looking up just a little for Kansas, now that Kathleen is gone. Apparently the new Guv (name escapes me) is approving one new coal fired plant, and as soon as Roberts is in in two years (the Dems have no bench here), the second will get the go ahead. We also got some good news from GM as far as manufacturing of one of the Buick models (Lucerne I think) goes. The Fairfax plant will not have the exteneded shutdown this summer, and will instead, work two extra weeks, that would be a normal shutdown. I guess as some plants get bad news, others will take up slack. It still looks like a mighty long road nationally though.:(

GM is headed for bankruptcy, read the financials, even their execs are dumping the stock.

The unemployment rate in Kansas has been rising steadily since July last year and continues to rise right through the end of the first quarter and beyond.

The problem here is people are looking for the trun around when the fact is we haven't even hit bottom.

The next real estate bubble is coming apart in the commercial sector, foreclosures are still rising, bankruptcies are still climbing and even strong companies are showing signs of cracking at the seams.

And we haven't actually even seen the effects of the house of credit cards our economy was fueled by to it's full extent.

I thought the new administration was frowning upon new coal plants.

I think he's talking governors.

It's a cycle, like it is every time this crap happens. It's the only way to clear out the dead wood in lots of industries and on Wall Street. The idiots that started the recession by floating derivatives are being shunted aside, and a giant needed correction is occurring.

All that said, it sucks to be us right now.

This cycle is different from past ones. Thisn't isn't a correction in the classical sense, this is a whole different ball game. No offense but most in your industry didn;t seem to realize there was a recession until it slapped them in the face.

I don't inherently include you in that group, but there seems to be a cognitive disconnect out there, one group says we're seeing signs of recovery based on ambiguous standards at best when the reality I see in the job markets say differently, the housing markets say differently, the credit markets say differently and the stock market lost touch with reality altogether awhile ago.

I disagree that there has been correction, the sub-primates are still offering funny money mortgages. What the investment banks did (and it was not just AIG) with their derivatives and tranches was what pulled the whole thing down around our heads, yet no one (other than Bernie) is in jail.

Our whole business sector needs a good stiff kick in the arse. No one seems to find it odd that 'the most powerfull man in the free world' gets what $800,000 a year, used to be $400,000. Meanwhile the head of Bof A gets $10,000,000 and he is a piker compared to some. Nowhere else in the world is the salary differential so great, CEOs get 300 times and more than the average worker.

I submit to you that there is no man or woman in this world worth more than $800,000 per year and there are damn few of them.

We used to be a democratic republic but now we are more like the Balkan States of America where the Jack System is the politics of the land.