Word: gluts
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...Despite the housing glut, Florida is fast discovering that there is still a glaring need for targeted low-income properties, for renters and owners alike. For that reason, housing advocates say the $10 billion in affordable-housing funds contained in President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package is as crucial as his more ballyhooed $75 billion bailout for homeowners facing foreclosure. "It's going to prevent a much greater crisis than we otherwise would have seen," says Jaimie Ross, affordable-housing director for 1000 Friends of Florida, a community-development organization. "Without it, our homeless rates would have skyrocketed this...
...consumers are slashing travel budgets just as a wave of new hotels is reaching the market. Some 5,400 hotels will likely open globally in 2009 and 2010, the biggest surge in a decade, according to research firm Lodging Econometrics. UBS real estate analyst Eric Wong predicts a glut. As a result, revenue per available room - a common measure of hotel performance - is expected to fall in every major market in 2009. "Everybody was trying to grab a slice of the action," says Wong. "Now a lot may start to unravel...
...inauguration of perhaps the first truly green President, the renewable energy industry - especially young solar manufacturers - is struggling to survive. The recession has already claimed victims: Three Western solar manufacturers, OptiSolar, HelioVolt and SunEdison, are reportedly cutting jobs in the face of declining demand. Where there was a glut of orders for new solar systems as recently as the past summer, prices for rooftop solar arrays have dropped 8% to 10% since October, and are likely to keep falling this year. Layoffs are happening even in the more mature wind industry - including big companies like the Spanish firm Gamesa, which...
Part of the industry's current problem is an oversupply of rooms. Sheraton, for example, is opening up 54 hotels this year, at a rate of one every three weeks, financed in the days when the economy was roaring and money was cheap. As the room glut deepens, hotel builders are slamming on the brakes - there is a 75% increase in projects being stopped. But demand is falling quickly too. "There's [been] nothing like this in history, in terms of falling demand" says Bjorn Hanson an industry analyst with New York University's hotel school. With the strengthening dollar...
...about the Great Depression of 1958. That's because the economy came roaring back later that year. This was in part a characteristic of the manufacturing-dominated economy of those days. GDP and employment would shrink precipitously one quarter as factories temporarily shut down to work off an inventory glut, then jump almost as much when they reopened. Things don't really work that way anymore - the jobs disappearing now aren't temporary layoffs, and the increased reliance on debt in the U.S. economy may bring self-reinforcing downward pressures that weren't an issue back in the relatively frugal...