From ABC News:
Even though their last checks bounced, former employees consider themselves lucky because they were at least home in Houston when everything collapsed. Hundreds of other drivers are stranded at truck stops across the country.
See the full story here, along with the accompanying video.
I want to say that this is a just a fluke, but trucking and freight stats are indicators of economic health, too, along with housing. This is bad news, and not just for the people directly affected.
For those of us following Dubai, the Beeb has a series of good stories on what is happening to property markets there, who is making the decisions, and what affects is it is having on US trade.
HT to David Levinson
This a an animation from The American Observer on the Geography of the Recession. Go see it: unbelievable.
A student threw a very public tantrum the other day and blamed the fact that he was facing the “worse job market since the Great Depression”. This is only marginally and recently true; the thing about my generation, wedged between the very loud Baby Boomers and their equally loud Echo, is that nobody has paid any attention to us, Gen X. But the 17.5 percent rate reported by the New York Times has only *just* exceeded the 17.1 percent of the early 1980s, which I remember quite well. This was in Iowa, where farm loss was routine and which all of our parents feared more than death.
So I listen to people give talks now and they say “the younger generations have never known such hard times as these” and it just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe he doesn’t consider my group young, but it’s not as though there haven’t been poor people during these generations’ lifetime. It’s that we didn’t pay them attention except to treat them like crap, blame them for their own poverty, and use all of the above as an excuse to dismantle the social safety net.