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Everything Bad is Good News to Somebody in the Economy

By Joseph McDaniel, Esq.

This is obvious, and one obvious example of it is that when wages went down, in dollars adjusted for inflation, that was good for some employers.

Those same employers are beneficiaries of high unemployment, which is running much, much higher than any official estimate.

But today's example of a silver lining for somebody is this: Blockbuster filed a Chapter 11. So Netflix stock hit an all-time high.

Now, my mom was a nurse, and my dad was a teacher at a junior high school. So the people I'd like to see doing well are people who are middle income, and those who help people in the middle income group, like doctors and lawyers and cpas and dentists.

Sadly, it looks to me as though it will be a long time until the folks in the middle class get a real raise; there may be an increase in the minimum wage, but that just increases unemployment. And there may be a wage increase as time moves forward; but it doesn't help if your wages go up 1% and inflation goes up 10%. You lost money on that transaction, right?

But I'll keep my fingers crossed, and hope that there will be a real increase in small business growth in the United States, because that actually creates jobs; and I would like to see a rise in job statistics, rather than bankruptcy statistics, around the United States.

Although folks have a tendency to wait to file personal consumer bankruptcy cases until after they have a new job.

When some copper mines in Arizona closed twenty-eight years ago, because the price of copper had gone down, I suggested to Chief U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Caldwell that we'd be seeing a lot of bankruptcy cases pretty soon.

He said I was wrong (that happened a lot) and instructed me that we'd be seeing bankruptcy cases, but not until the mines reopened.

And, as was often the case, he was absolutely right.

Full post as published by Arizona Bankruptcy Attorney Blog on September 24, 2010 (boomark / email).