Economic Upturn or big time head fake?

"It's always darkest just before it goes totally black..." John McCain--2008 Presidential Campaign.

With jokes like this, it's a small wonder how Barack Obama could have ever beaten him in the election last year. But as of the middle of November, I was beginning to think he had a point. Layoffs seemed to never stop, the economic news was at best, spotty, Congress was paralyzed by health care, the dollar was falling like a rock.

But it seemed like just when I had written off the economy, and was ready to embrace the Peter Schiff world viewpoint with open arms, a funny thing happened. Instead of total blackness, the dawn started to emerge. Friends of mine who had been laid off were starting to find jobs. Clients I had been trying to sell to for a year and a half, ALL started to buy. In small doses, but in a couple of cases, in large quantities. So I watched to see if the November jobs report came in with any force. At 11,000 net jobs lost, we had basically climbed all the way back to break even. So I started to gain some cautious optimism.

I say cautious, because this has always been a time of year when companies buy services due to budget overhang. My thought was that perhaps companies simply budgeted some spend on my services, but hadn't used them up to now. They have realized that there is a baseline of business that hasn't gone away, and some issues and inventory that they need to deal with and maintain. So they have reached out. This is one possibility. If this turns out to be the case, I will consider the "light at the end of the tunnel", to be merely a train looking to run me over. However, this feels different.

I am still very concerned about the dollar's weakness, and fear it may never come back. A recent trip overseas opened my eyes to the reality of just how expensive the rest of the world is these days, and how important it is for me to be diversified into some overseas markets.

That being said, I'm encouraged by the fact that we still have a highly educated population, ingenuity, and, as recent news would indicate, we are not alone in having financial and domestic unrest. In other words, things may be bad here, but we're not Dubai, Greece, or Hungary...yet.

And there's more good news. TARP has proven to be much less of a disaster than anticipated. This "$700 Billion waste of money" has been getting repaid by all of the top banks, at $20B a pop. It wouldn't shock me in the least to see us get just about the whole thing back. Cash for clunkers was such a disaster that auto sales were supposed to just plummet this fall. Only they didn't. Which leads me to the conclusion that perhaps this inane government plan that could NEVER work, in reality actually worked. The homeowner credit, the cash for caulkers credits, and all the rest, may actually help people to revive a moribund economy, bit by bit.

For all the talk about Obama's lack of achievements, I'd suggest he's done quite a lot this year. After all, he's passed a stimulus bill, the unemployment acceleration has been completely stalled, and has basically gone to zero, the automobile industry has swung up, with help from Cash for clunkers, TARP is being agressively repaid, he's made key decisions on Afghanistan (which I DONT agree with, but that's another story), and by the beginning of next year, will have passed a health care bill, which may need some work, but at least moves in the right direction on providing a basic necessity to all Americans in a cost competitive model. Somewhere in there, he even found time to accept a nobel peace prize. What did YOU accomplish this past year?

But to bring it all back to my original point, we'll see how well the economy rebounds here, but I'm cautiously optimistic that on December 29, 2009, things look FAR better than they did on December 29, 2008! Happy New Year to all! Best wishes for 2010. I'm looking forward to some election battles and nasty campaigns!