Who Needs Money, Anyway?

Certainly not Lily Gold, a Brooklyn artist who says she is, "constantly looking for ways to eliminate hard currency from my life." She recently created a bartering event at a Park Slope art gallery. According to the internets, she is not alone in preferring to trade.
An e-commerce expert interviewed by am NY says that, "as the economy has nose-dived, the "free-trade" movement has skyrocketed." And he doesn't mean the kind of "free trade" that allows you to buy bargain blouses at Wal-Mart made in Pakistan or Bangladesh. He means swapping goods and services instead of paying for them

Due to a timely combination in the of generalized brokeness and increasing access to the internet, lately US consumers are returning to the good ol' days of bartering. For many, this means access to products or services that would be out of reach otherwise, because bartering opens up opportunities that don't exist in a classical economic system, where pricing is marked to the market.

A bartering system instead can give the economic edge in any given deal to unlikely and unexpected parties, as it simply benefits those who happen to have a particular item or service that is in demand at that particular time by a peer.

Can you feel the thrill???

For a while, Craigs List (with its "barter" section) had the corner on this market, but among the bartering websites that have cropped up lately are:
HomeExchange.com, where you can trade houses for a vacation (ooh, think anyone will want to trade a noisy, cramped apartment in Brooklyn for a thatch-roof beach house on an island??); MakeupAlley.com, a "beauty social network" which offers product reviews as well as the possibility to make trades;FrugalReader and PaperBackSwap, both book trading websites; TextSwap, which is for textbooks in particular, BarterBee.com, for movies, music, and games; and, finally, SwapThing and TargetBarter which are forums for trading and bartering all categories of things.

Kindergarten Lessons Come in Handy

Recent negotiations between Minnesota and Wisconsin suggest that the recession is creating some unlikely friendships at the same time that it sparks innovation in the world of commerce.

The two midwestern states are becoming mighty neighborly as they attempt to pinch pennies to work with shrinking budgets, turning towards the idea of sharing resources in a way that has never been considered before. The discussion started thanks to a fishy dilemma: Minnesota needed some of the tiny walleye fish, and Wisconsin needed some fingerlings; Minnesota had plenty of fingerlings and needed some walleyes.

Duh. It was a match made in heaven.
Some genius suggested the states share their resources, and now that idea has extended to everything from bullets for police use to sign language interpreters. A full report on the proposal can be found here. And all over the country, other states are acting in kind, sharing (everything from prison inmates to townships!) in order to cut costs instead of jobs.

It will be interesting to see how these deals pan out, and whether this will mark a smart new trend in trade or is just a temporary strategy borne of necessity.

Kids, Get That Guest Room Ready For Your Parents!

...to live in. Forever.

The Obama Administration announced on Tuesday that the program's reserves face depletion by 2037, four years earlier than last year's estimate. Meanwhile, the Medicare fund is predicted to exhaust itself in 2017.

Just in case you still took the phrase "Social Security" seriously.