[Matt Monson]

I've never been accused of being in the inner circle before. I just know that most economic recoveries start from the top down, and that's what my professional experience suggests in this current economic slowdown. After being flat and tapering for about a year, my business cratered hard in the fall of 2009. As in sales were off more than 50% over previous year same month periods.

Starting about 14 months ago my business started to recover. Racers started to open their pocketbooks and spend money again. Now we're back up to and over our pre-2008 recession sales numbers. Sure, we're only one company and it's anecdotal, but the majority of race shops in America that prep cars for Club and professional racing uses our parts in their cars. We've got a very wide market sampling in our customer base and deal with both the big pro operations and the smallest of the small one or two man mom and pop P-car shops. A lot of the smaller operations tell me they are still struggling and are hand to mouth. The bigger shops and companies report more of a stable business flowing in the doors.

I really think what is being observed by the OP has very little to do with Porsches specifically and has more to do with toys generally. I bet the same sort of slowdown is present in high end speedboats or in snowmobile sales as well. When there's a recession on, people stop spending money on playthings.

I think the absence of cars on the market may be related to people who aren't forced to sell not being willing to sell until they feel the prices have recovered. All the crisis sale cars of two years ago are gone and sold. A lot of these owners aren't connected to the day to day fluctuations in prices and just pull the car off the market for 6 months or a year and don't check back on pricing until they consider selling again.