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Strategies & Market Trends : The coming US dollar crisis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gregor_us who wrote (23650)	10/21/2009 12:42:26 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71407

let's face it, the level of desperation back then was much worse than now. i've seen those 37% figures, but i think by today's standards practically the entire population was U-6 in the Deprssion. then, people were worried about eating*. somebody who was a banker might become a day laborer or pick fruit. now, somebody who was an engineer might go to work at Home Depot or Starbucks and be captured by U-6. if you had the equivalent of a Home Depot or SBUX job back then you would be considered gainfully employed. i don't see a lot of middle-aged engineers riding in the backs of pickups with Mexican day laborers these days. the level of compromise people made back then is a whole nuther dimension.

To: gregor_us who wrote (23650)	10/21/2009 1:03:44 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71407

also, i am a little skeptical of U-6 because it just plays into the hands of b**rs who are always trying to look at something in the worst light possible. let's say somebody gets an English Lit BA from Harvard. this degree qualifies you to do what? basically, to read novels, maybe plays, and offer critiques on them. so this guy with the $200,000 name-brand piece of paper, is qualified to do nothing more than a person of equivalent intelligence who dropped out of school at age 16. but having gone to Harvard (he tells you of course), he thinks he is entitled to some high-paying job, because Don Draper got some high-paying job based on similar qualifications half a century ago. but what Mr. Harvard finds is, there are fewer and fewer of these fantasy jobs where you make six figures because you read novels really, really well. in the end he goes to work at Home Depot or a supermarket or something. for the first time in his life he keeps the fact that he went to Harvard to himself. except when he takes this survey that asks him whether he feels satisfied with his job. then he says he feels unsatisfied. so he is counted as U-6. but maybe what's really happening is Mr. Market is telling Mr. Harvard he just has a useless piece of paper that doesn't qualify him for anything more than what he's doing in today's world. now, instead of Mr. Harvard you can have Mr. State School. you can even have Mr. Electrical Engineering Degree. every day Mr. Market sends out these signals to all these people holding various pieces of paper telling them the pieces of paper aren't worth what they thought they were worth in the job market. but these people might ignore the signal and just keep believing what the career guidance counselor told them in high school about what their degree in such-and-such from so-and-so would be worth. so these people all say on the employment survey that they are underemployed. but maybe they aren't underemployed. maybe they are getting paid what they are really worth in today's market, and they just need to wake up to that fact, instead of waiting for the "rebound" to save them. if this idea is correct, then a lot of people need to be excluded from U-6 since they are in fact gainfully employed. they just don't know it yet.