[Porsche-O-Phile]

It's all about the jobs.

Until people sever the rectal-cranial connection and hiding behind "well employment is always a lagging indicator of recovery", there won't be one. Period. It's that simple. Businesses and/or governments need to be creating jobs. REAL jobs, not phony, temporary or part-time "stimulus" ones. Until this starts to happen and people really start believing that they might actually get back to earning again, there will not be a recovery.

And where exactly are those jobs going to be created? Energy sector? Doubt it - saturated already. Manufacturing? Riiiiiight - if you're in China maybe. Construction? Don't make me laugh, not with every 5th building vacant right now. Healthcare? Maybe, but there's concern that government meddling and/or potential nationalization might kill that one too. There are also very steep barriers to entry. Entertainment? Nope, not until jobs/incomes come back - that one's a lagger. Retail? Same story, typically. Some varying degrees of elasticity to account for staple/durable goods.

Where's the growth going to happen? What's going to be the "next big thing"? This is what all the investors are sitting on the sidelines waiting to see right now and there won't be any meaningful job creation (and by extension, no real recovery) until people start to believe they know what it is and start seeing potential somewhere.

Hypothetically, let's assume it's alternative energy. This is one a lot of people (including Obama) point to as having promise. The reality is that it's going to take a while to convince people (especially with global petrol prices crashing) that this is the correct way to go. Investors are skeptical. Why sink billions into a risky endeavor when you have a "sure thing" with oil and natural gas right now? Not to mention pretty stable profit margins. It's a tough sell. Even if it were to catch on, it takes a long time to train/retrain people to work in a new technology area like that and for the "legit" players to establish themselves versus the fly-by-nighters. It'd take a while for any kind of real job growth there. And even then, would it really be enough to offset the millions of losses we've seen? Maybe, but I have my doubts...

I think we're in for a very long, painful period of high unemployment, recession, destroyed personal wealth, shattered dreams and net decline. For the foreseeable future. I just simply do not see any area where real innovation can happen to spark the kind of job growth necessary for a meaningful recovery. Across-the-board virtually every sector appears saturated, played-out, uncertain or otherwise not convincing enough to investors and companies to stake money on it. And that means "no job creation". We went through this same scenario (for those with short memories) recently in 2002-2003. Remember everyone railing against GWB and his "greatest job destruction since the Great Depression"? A lot of these same issues were discussed then. The ONLY thing that "pulled us out" of the recession then was the artificially "stimulated" growth in the housing sector. That's it. And that simply shifted the problem to today - now we're paying for it with interest. A lot of interest. We can't "stimulate" our way out of this one artificially. This is not your father's recession. This one is a referendum on our entire economic model and thus far, its appears to be coming up "no confidence".

We need real, new, fresh ideas - not just more government-mandated artificial prop-ups like "cap-and-tax", or "green building" laws/codes/requirements or a bloated government-run healthcare system that nobody can understand.

Eventually "good old Yankee ingenuity" will rear up, there will be a growth area somewhere and people will pig-pile onto it. Business will spring up and investment money will flow. Jobs will be created. THEN (and only then) will we see recovery. But I don't know where that will be, or when. For now it seems like innovation is pretty dead in the U.S. and until it comes back, there ain't gonna' be no recovery.