There are a great many differences between Ben Bernanke and myself other than that he has a good paying job with all the perks and benefits. He judges the economy by the reports he reads say and I judge it by what I see and hear. He reads his reports of economic performance while I merely look out the window.
"The U.S. economy remains "weak" and "fragile" and has a "significant" chance of falling back into a recession, Harvard University economics professor Martin Feldstein said in an interview with Bloomberg Radio.
The auto body shop next door has no cars on the parking lot to paint or to work on. The cabinet shop next door to me has no work. The owner has laid off his second man and Thursday the owner was working on a chair he brought in from home. Today he didn't come in at all and on the other side of him is Dinky's Harley shop. When Dinky is busy the Harleys roar up and down the lane. Dinky is a quiet man in his fifties with a real nice shop. Dinky told me once his health insurance cost him $3,000 a month because he had problems with his kidneys a few years back.
No Harleys have roared out of Dinky's this week and this the week end before the last holiday weekend of summer. On the other side of Dinky is another auto repair shop and they don't have any work either. In the back of the complex is B&G Automotive. A fella named Andreas operates it and until the other day I had never seen the back wall of his shop. He was always busy and sometimes we swap parts back and forth to help each other out. The other day I was emptying the trash and Andreas was sitting in the office reading a magazine. His shop was empty and the parking lot was empty.
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