The Economists Finally Know What Business Has Known For A Long Time

So the economists finally come around to realize what hey!!! We have a ressesion going on. They could have just talked to my dad about that, things in his business have been going downhill for nearly a year. My dad is a contractor. First of all he was hit by commodity prices rising at levels never seen before. He was able to adjust to that though by doing what most other contractors did, which is to not gaurantee the price of copper and other metals. That worked out okey and the world spun just as it should. About six months ago though people stopped paying. A lot of the construction business is done on credit, and contractors depend upon the credit worthyness of their clients, and construction supply stores depend upon the credit worthyness of the constractors. The clients my dad has are mostly business, clients like Sour Danfass, Ball Corp, Pella Windows, Barilla and a host of local business. About six months ago he started to notice that more and more of his clients had accounts past due, about 1/3 of them. Well its gotten even worse and now over half of his clients are at least 90 days past due in payments that they owe him. Some are trying to arrange to pay less, others just ignore his calls all together. His situation is not unique, every one of his friends in the same business are experiencing the exact same thing. This is not in a place that got overheated like Florida, or a state in an obvious recession like Michigan. This is in Iowa, rural Iowa where the ethonol boom is still making some people wealthy beyond what they ever thought could happen to them. So, its good to see the economists finally come around to see what businessmen have known for some time. Another friend of mine owns a t-shirt store near Siesta Beach in Florida, his sales are the worst they have been since the late 80's, he is thinking about just closing the store and finding something else to do.