Saturday, April 12, 2014

Monday, June 7, 2010

What To Do In A Recession

There are more and more surprises with this recession. The environment for doing business has certainly gotten tougher, with companies laying off people in order to curtail runaway costs in their budgets. Certain industries are suffering severely, and that might make you think that there aren't any prospering, but that's not true. In addition, not every demographic has suffered equally. To really understand the environment of this recession, one has to pay attention to what industries are affected most and why some people suffer more than others.
Collapsing Industries
Obviously, the biggest problem with the economy started with the collapse of the housing market around the country. This led to layoffs in construction and a huge drop-off of real estate investments. Lenders who lent money to people who could not afford their mortgages also got affected as buyer after buyer got foreclosed, depressing the markets and the income levels in certain regions across the country. The economies that had real estate booms with double-digit gains during previous years are now the ones facing a large glut of foreclosed homes and many unemployed workers.
This is trickling into other areas, not just construction. Financial services areas are in stasis, frozen with fear, about where the next credit or debt problem will arise in the market. Borrowing has become very difficult and that has affected retailers and businesses that have to borrow to make payroll or operating expenses. Many of these closed too.
In addition, banks with unsupportable balance sheets have had to be bailed out to keep the economy from teetering into oblivion. These are times for people with nerves of steel and an ability to weed out the real bad news from the panic that keeps reasonable decisions from being made to provide a path back to prosperity.
Don't Hide, Analyze
Every downturn provides an opportunity as well as a calamity. Smart business owners know that in order to have a business, one has to provide solutions to problems that are out there, and right now, there are plenty of problems out there. By analyzing the trends going on in the marketplace, Internet marketers can start to figure out how to position themselves for the next cycle in the economy that always takes place after a recession: Recovery. Until then, they can crunch the demographics numbers, the market returns, and the changing needs to better adapt to changing market forces.