Just had supper with a group of friends. A buddy of mine is a plumber on commercial buildings. He does a lot of Walmarts and public schools. He said he was out bid on his last job by a guy that under bid him by $35,000. He said the guy could not cover the cost of materials on the bid price.

I suspect the guy is going to get his first draw, pay his people and file bankruptcy.

Materials cost are way down. The highest bid for the rennovation and expansion of one of the county's high schools came in at 20 million dollars less than the estimated price and the amount that was bonded by the voters.

Link->Building materials cost down dramatically.

Dollar is starting down again. Gold and silver are up again. Looks like the US is on track to hit the economic rocks sometime later this year, say, mid to late summer. Gas is inching up again, and a significant increase in fuel prices will drive another nail in the stalling US economy. Unemployment is in double digits (official numbers--real ones are near double the official ones) in a Michigan and California. It's probably near 10% here in Indiana, too--9.2% last I looked.

All this pushes the doom-o-meter up, but what really bothers me is the Fed announcing "Quantitative Easing". Printing money, It looks like there will be no end to deficit spending until the Treasury bond market shuts off credit to the US, AND the ROW no longer wants dollars. End game, coming right up here.

Patience, Kenneth Rogoff--Harvard economist. Really interesting. Talks about conscious attempts to inflate their way out of the problems

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/511/index.html

My dad who works at one of the most successful Honda dealerships in the country just had his pay docked for not selling enough cars. He's getting scapegoated while others have already been let go. This gives you an idea what's going on in the auto sector. I can only imagine how dire things are with GM and Chrysler dealerships.

OUCH. OK- that paints a glum picture.

I KNOW this crap is going on through the rest of the country, but as of now we STILL seem near totally untouched by economic crises. No major store shut downs as of yet here, shelves still brim full in the food stores and at Wally World and Target. No prep I want I can't buy. On the intellectual scale observing the huge Obamouts and the escalating unemployment in the lower 48, my personal Doom-o-meter has been MAXED for quite some time. On the PRACTICAL level, my other Doom-o-meter still is sitting in the Green Zone.

I believe the reason for this is the Twin Prongs of the local economy here, Oil and the Military. The Goobermint will continue to fund military to protect this place so long as Oil has value and it can be pumped from the Slope or the ANWR. Unless there is a currency collapse, I don't think we are going to be hit here too soon. Even with a currency collapse, I think the local economy will be run on military scrip of some kind.

Its very weird for me as a Doomer. I see the Doom happening down there in the lower 48 and in the stories in the MSM, but my personal life and my job are just peachy right now. I can actually see it possible I will be sitting up here barbecuing Moose Burgers this summer while cities down in the lower 48 are going up in flames. That is just weird.

Reverse Engineer

an salmon stakes............

RE

Well, I live in Center City Philly and I see things much as you do. Little to no evidence of THSTF. Buildings still going up. My property value hardly affected. And it looks like my company is coming off a long dry spell and has the best backlog of proposals in a long, long time. And I got a call to get a stimulus package contract, out of the blue. The gun store has pallets of ammo.

I do see the Circuit City close. Target has some mixed stuff on the shelves, the jewelery counter is empty. But that does not effect me. My oil and energy stocks are in the pits - which is totally counter intuitive.

I have been running a monthly movie series at my church. The deniers and cornucopians abound, and those are the ones who come to listen.

All that I'm still pretty darn doomerish myself. Short term it is hard for me to see how we are going to pull out of this depression when we have to fight through over population and resource depletion. Long term Cid has pretty well convinced me that the environment is in the potty never to return. My struggle is how to prepare for the next 5 years. I have no confidence that I can predict the short term fluctuations in any meaningful way.

Venison for dinner, or frozen ground hog stew.

This is another part of what has made everything go so wrong. When I was a kid in the sixties and seventies it was common to hear of obvious low ball bidders being refused participation in bidding. I remember overhearing the older men talking about such incidents. If they didn't have a good explanation for the below cost bid they were tossed because those soliciting the bids had a sense of duty to ensure that the project was done right and they knew that it couldn't be if fly-by-nighters came in and made things worse. That sense of duty disappeared in contracting along with the controls on lending in the banking sector. In my opinion working for yourself is very close to the renter capitalism that Marx warned us about so many years ago. Not everywhere, but certainly where there is much competition for work.

I have a buddy who is a small plumber who recently reported a similar incident. For a while I was a PM for a large electrical.

Competitive bid contracting is a tough business. Doing a perfect bid does not mean you will win the job. The job often goes to the guy who either made the most mistakes or to the most desperate or to the least honest. The client will suffer in any case. The good contractor also suffers from lack of work. Then the situation sets up a natural confrontational relationship between the Contractor and Owner. The Contractor has the right to take the lowest cost alternative or interpretation in all cases. The Owner typically expects the "best."

All that being said, this stuff goes on all the time and is not in itself an indication of a bad economy.

That's when the volcano up there really blow.

My doom-o-meter is beginning to show some activity. This next summer could be a hot one. In California there are about 3 million people out of work. They may start to get restless as the temperatures climb.

Here in Maine there are a lot of people out of work too. They could get a bit restless, even though the temperatures almost never get too hot.

I'm more worried about next winter around here.

Summertime and the living is easy.

Yup. California could get ruthless.

About an hour ago some guy in Oakland whacked four cops. He died as other police were trying to ... catch him.

No other information. It's all over the news. Cnn, etc.

Concur. Rumor control has it that the California (and some other states') Medicaid fund is near-empty. When that runs out, hospitals no longer get reimbursed. And then come closings and layoffs in the medical field.

I also expect another leg down in the market. If the current hope is supplanted by despair, life could get exciting.