Originally Posted by
jackal
As far as the economy, I keep hearing that it's in shambles, but I haven't noticed it. Business is up even now, bookings are up for the summer season, tour contractors are booking more than last year (and they're mostly domestic tourists, although we expect more foreign tourists this year due to the dollar). Maybe it's because our economy is based on natural resources, and that fluctuates a lot less than jobs in the commercial and industrial/manufacturing sectors...
It may be that American tourists who would travel to Europe are going to Alaska instead, the Euro is *so* strong versus the dollar right now that it's acting as a real barrier for overseas traveler. I've heard a lot of my friends talking about South America or Asia rather than Europe, but I'd bet Alaska could be benefiting from that as well.
The economy is just starting to shed jobs down here as well, but the credit crunch is going to cause real problems in the near term unless a miracle happens. The financial institutions are being VERY careful about lending, which means money is hard to get, which means businesses don't have easy access to capital. The Fed's rate cuts (which amount to what, almost 2% i nthe last couple of months?) are meant to provide incentives to the financial institutions to loan money out... but the consensus is that we haven't hit bottom yet, as the amount of home foreclosures continues to increase (in SoCal I think they're up something like 90% over last year). Home price have dropped in almost all major cities (on average by 11%), on NPR last week I heard that in something like half of the top 20 major cities home prices have dropped by 20%! That makes a real difference in our economy, as people have been using home equity to keep spending up, without consumer spending our economy goes straight into the crapper.
That was a rather long-winded way of saying that while things don't look bad now, in 6 months they might look quite a bit worse. Or the economy could recover and things will be looking up. I certainly hope the latter is the case.