The Hindu Business Line : Reading the worry lines

At Terminal 7 of the JFK Airport where one has a three-hour wait to board a United Airlines flight, the mood is certainly subdued. There is no great rush at the shopping area, the book store and the food counters either; and this is certainly unusual for Americans.

A three-hour wait is certainly good enough to study behaviour patterns, and surely there is some kind of a pointer here at the slowing down of the American economy, shivers of which have been felt on our own Dalal Street in no mean measure.

But a casual chat with a couple of executives working for an American corporate gives you a diametrically opposite viewpoint. One of these, Martha, doesn’t think there is any evidence of her country’s economy heading into “some kind of recession. No, none of my friends or relatives are caught in the sub-prime tangle. And I finished paying for my home several years ago.”

Rudy, my taxi driver – well not a run-of-the-mill cabbie, but a smartly dressed employee of an upper end transportation company – who drives me to my hotel in Los Angeles, also shakes his head. “No, ma’am, I don’t think we’ve hit bad times at all, things are fine here.”

And this response comes from somebody who is surely not unaware of heated debates on television cannels about a distinct possibility of fuel prices hitting the dreaded $4 per gallon mark!

When I point this out to an Indian colleague, he scoffs: “You know these people are like ostriches with their heads buried deeply into the sand; they don’t realise anything till it hits them in the face.”

Switch on the NBC or CNN and the lead story invariably is on the gloom and doom on the economic front ... a hot competition is, of course, provided by New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and his involvement in a prostitution racket.

Last Friday, the lead story of the NBC morning show is about a Wall Street Journal survey of leading economists. “About 70 per cent of them think the economy is already in recession,” says the anchor, adding, many of us find this to be the most pervasive financial crisis ever. There are bets that come summer and fuel prices will hit the $4-mark, if “Americans do not pull back on their high fuel consumption habits.”

On another channel somebody complains, “Food prices are soaring, bread prices have doubled.” Not unusually for the media, she has a glib explanation for this too. “You see the Chinese and the Indians are buying more food so wheat prices have shot up!”

While a huge chunk of value has been knocked off people’s homes that are yet to be paid for, rising cost of living really hurts… Fuel is around $3.5, but what hurts the most are grocery prices.

This time Manuel, who drives me in a swank Cadillac from Monterey to San Francisco, has got it all right. “Earlier, you could put a lot of grocery in your shopping cart if you spent $50-100, but these days, you’re lucky to get a portion of what this money used to fetch at the supermarket not so long ago. And, I’m told, it’s going to get much worse before it gets better.”

His vote, by the way, will go to Barack Obama… “he inspires in me hope for better times.”

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Reading the worry lines