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When people ask me why I sold my house in Madrona last month and moved to a rental apartment on Capitol Hill, I say, "The economy is going to tank." But that's not exactly accurate: The economy has been tanking since last August. I just sense that things will get much worse before they improve. When I call my brother Paul, in California, he insists, "There will be a depression in two years like nothing we've seen before." Paul is a bankruptcy lawyer. He's very busy at the moment making money off other people's bad judgment and bad luck. And, being Irish, he has a genetic tendency to catastrophize.
Can't you feel the tension rising? We're in the middle of a major cultural and economic shift. Tension is rising with the cost of gas and food. Gas has doubled in price over the past year and food costs are intimately connected to transportation costs. Food banks are coming up short against increasing demand in cities all over the U.S. Jobs are less certain, school and home loans are less abundant, credit-card companies are less aggressively marketing to us. We are selling large chunks of major financial companies to foreign countries. Last December, Morgan Stanley sold a $5 billion stake in its investment firm to the Chinese government. General Electric recently sold its plastics unit to a financial entity of the Saudi Arabian government for $11.6 billion. Anheuser-Busch just got a $46.3 billion buyout bid from a Belgian beer company called InBev. What's more American than an ice-cold Bud on the Fourth of July? The number of Europeans buying condos in Manhattan doubled in the past year; the weak dollar has made real estate on both coasts a bargain for foreigners...
United States of Anxiety - Features - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper
Can't you feel the tension rising? We're in the middle of a major cultural and economic shift. Tension is rising with the cost of gas and food. Gas has doubled in price over the past year and food costs are intimately connected to transportation costs. Food banks are coming up short against increasing demand in cities all over the U.S. Jobs are less certain, school and home loans are less abundant, credit-card companies are less aggressively marketing to us. We are selling large chunks of major financial companies to foreign countries. Last December, Morgan Stanley sold a $5 billion stake in its investment firm to the Chinese government. General Electric recently sold its plastics unit to a financial entity of the Saudi Arabian government for $11.6 billion. Anheuser-Busch just got a $46.3 billion buyout bid from a Belgian beer company called InBev. What's more American than an ice-cold Bud on the Fourth of July? The number of Europeans buying condos in Manhattan doubled in the past year; the weak dollar has made real estate on both coasts a bargain for foreigners...
United States of Anxiety - Features - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper
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