Last Friday, the day the US Congress passed the stimulus bill, more than 250 people arrived at the Holiday Inn in Somerset for a careers fair. There are scenes like this all over the country. In San Francisco last week, queues for a similar fair went out of the door and around the block. In Miami last month, a thousand people waited in line, some overnight, for just 35 firefighter jobs.
But New Jersey has not quite suffered like the rest of the country, and in Somerset the line of hopefuls is long but moves reasonably fast. For the most part, they came in sober suits dressed as though — if someone made an offer — they could start work today. Most clutched resumes and stared off into the middle distance, trying not to catch anyone’s eye. And in a county broadly reflective of the nation demographically, white men over the age of 40 were considerably overrepresented.
The fact that there is a line at all in Somerset County is significant. According to the census, Somerset has a median income that is almost twice the national average and a poverty rate below 25 percent. If there’s a line here, then there are lines everywhere.
Larry, 48, used to organize meetings within the pharmaceutical industry but was laid off in July. When he started at the firm two years ago there were 75 employees — now there are just more than 20.
“We’ve become a bloated society and we need to readjust to a much simpler lifestyle,” he says. “Because these are tough times and things will probably get worse before they get better.”
Everyone waiting has their own story, but two threads keep emerging: Almost all were laid off in the last nine months. And had you asked them a year ago, none of them would have believed they would be in the position they are today. If there is one thing more staggering than the scale of this economic crisis, it is its pace.
The vertiginous decline in house prices, portfolios, government budgets, payrolls and balance sheets has forced a reckoning with the world as we thought we knew it.
On the same day that they waited in Somerset, four banks failed. The banks were small and spanned the country from Oregon to Florida. Beyond their locales they will not be missed. And yet together their demise makes you wonder how many canaries you can fit in a mine. In 2007 there were three bank failures in the whole year. Last year there were 25. Now we are up to four in one day, making 13 already since the year started.
These were small enough to fail. According to some economists, if the larger banks were forced to struggle on alone they would have suffered a similar fate long ago.
“At this moment, the liabilities they have far exceed their assets,” Adam Posen, of the Peterson Institute, told the New York Times, referring to the banking sector. “They are insolvent.”
In less than a year we have gone from former US president George W. Bush claiming, “I don’t think we’re headed to a recession” to a Newsweek cover declaring: “We’re all socialists now.”
Nobody knows who to believe.
As banks crash, jobs vanish and pensions disappear, the anxiety becomes endemic. In the past three months alone, the percentage of those for whom jobs are their principal worry has almost doubled. Something has to give. As the line in Somerset suggests, the crisis has now reached those least likely to take to the streets but most likely to go to the polls.
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