Gee, what did McClatchy tell me this morning?
…North Carolina’s economy is looking more like Michigan’s…. …”The numbers are simply atrocious…” ….The Charlotte metro area should continue to have a higher unemployment rate than the state as a whole…. …The mergers and job cuts that have come in banking have been magnified in this state – and it’s going to get worse… …”we have a much larger exposure to many of the industries that are getting hit the hardest”…
Any more “the worst is behind us” crap and I’m gonna slap somebody. The major local income loss is ahead of us, not behind. Without income there is no consumption, even if federal money tries to fill the gap. More specifically, here is a metric I’d love for someone to tease out: How many SVPs making $300K a year does Charlotte have in Q3 09 compared to Q3 07? That is the money that greased CLT’s go-go boomtimes — and I don’t think it is ever coming back.
Charlotte basically sat at the apex of the great banking bubble. If it helps, let’s drop our prescient if derogatory Detroit-on-the-Catawba meme and turn back in history. Much further back, to the Silk Road. Great cities grew up, very wealthy and famous for years upon years only to sink back under the sands when economic fundamentals changed.
Wealth and power which flowed through city gates was diverted, sometimes abruptly, never to return. Soon enough petty tribal rivalries which had been submerged by years of plenty boiled back to surface, pitting faction against faction for control over what was left. Such conflict only accelerated the decline and breakdown in civic order and eventually all that remained was ruins, bandits, and brigands.
This is the macro picture with some dramatic historic glazing. On the micro level, ask yourself what will all those those thousands of local white-collar workers do as the banks shed jobs? What skill sets — really — do they possess? What will those skills command in terms of income? Probably less but will it be 10 percent? 25? 50? Exactly no one knows because Charlotte has never had this kind of labor market before. But here is what I wonder about.
We all know some of the boomtime jobs with the banks were do-nothing, count-money kinda jobs. Hell, I could name names if I felt like fighting off a defamation suit. But what if most were do-nothing, produce-nothing jobs? What if Charlotte had the modern equivalent of a horde of gold coin counters, pouring over the city’s take from the economic system of the day.
And then that system went away.
