Last week we had two views of the world appear...first, we had a Deutsche Bank economist predict that the residential real estate market was going to have another, more severe, decline in value while the Feds reported that the unemployment rate fell .01 percent...As my colleague, Steve Felix noted in his weekly On the Road series..."More than not, our colleagues’ feel that another shoe is yet to drop in the commercial real estate industry. With the stock market having had a very good week (although the conversion rate of Canadian to U.S. dollars dropping which is pissing me off) perhaps things are picking up. However, as a taxi driver reminded me this week, “There are still more and more jobs being lost, more and more people losing their homes and more and more people struggling to get by.” So I guess there are two stories in this naked country; those promulgated by the media and our elected officials and those that are the grassroots truth. No one I know is adding to their wardrobe these days, even with ‘sale’ signs as plentiful as weeds in flowerbeds where the gardener has been cut back from every week to every month. This business with the car industry I just don’t know how I feel about it. What makes them so special that they deserve this kind of incentivization just so they can make sales? How about all the other businesses, those owned by individuals (not individuals owning stock but individuals owning and operating the actual business). How about all those businesses closing? Don’t those folks deserve the same help that these characters in Detroit and elsewhere are getting? I just don’t get it. I must be missing something." We do have a dichotomy....and I contend that the unemployment rate is understated are the independent business operators, contractors, brokers and agents who do not qualify for unemployment benefits but are not employed plus those whose benefits have expired and still cannot find a job are no longer considered unemployed.....Talking up the economy may help consumer confidence but when you look at your bank balance and your work in process, it is hard to get encouragement from the statistics and the pundits....what we need is to continue the process of putting a floor to this recession....and the floor is open for ideas.....