Hotel Boom During A Recession?

Nearly 100 hotels are scheduled to open in major American cities this year! This year.

What are these people thinking?!?
Well, probably - "Shit."


See, they didn't intend to open their hotels amid a crippling recession. In a New York Times article this weekend the president of Smith Travel Research, explained that “hotel building cycles rarely mesh just right with economic cycles.” Since planning a new hotel can take two to four years, and construction an additional one to four years, most of the hotels slated to open next year were planned when the economy was strong.

But now, travel is down. The recent performance of airlines - with desperate grabs at expansion, new, unfair fees, and extreme cutbacks - and this report that corporate meetings are being canceled faster than you can say, "subprime mortgage," indicate the sad state of the tourism and travel industries.

The upside is that all the competition generated in an increasingly saturated market will mean great deals for the traveler. According to the article, travel experts agreed that business and leisure travelers could generally expect a broader choice of rooms at better prices than a couple of years ago.

Keynes/Hayek Battle Rap!

Check out this video by producer Russ Roberts -- Hilarious spoof on economists John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek lyrically battling over their respective theories. Read about the process at Roberts' blog or at Planet Money.

"Frugal Fatigue" Among the Upper Class

By now you've heard that some of the most powerful banks on Wall St. posted record profits in 2009. Impressive! And those banks will be rewarding their executives with big fat bonuses as per usual. But of course! Well noo, no of course these weren't the same banks that received billions in federal assistance in order to prevent bankruptcy! - wait, they were?

Well surely we can all be glad that these long-suffering companies are back on their feet, as healthy banks mean healthy loans for the rest of us who are just tryin' to live the American Dream. After all, these banks were granted that bailout on the assumption that the influx of cash would get credit flowing again.

What's that? The banks have cut back on the money they're lending?

How strange!

The fact is, while most U.S. Americans wait patiently for an economic recovery, the "other America" is tired of playing frugal fannie. They piously reined in their spending this past year, largely out of fear of being judged for spending in an era of widespread economic uncertainty. Perhaps they feared they would become the targets of the same suspicion and criticism they direct toward families on welfare who dare to buy their kids new clothes. After all, the cash funding that new Bentley came from what essentially amounts to corporate welfare.

Well, after months of chaste frugality, the Wall St. crowds are and ready to get to spending their "hard-earned" million dollar bonuses. High on the it-list are vacation homes, art, and jewelry. But don't worry, they won't be conspicuous about it.

Almost Frugal

Check me out on Almost Frugal, in Kelly's series "This Is What Frugal Looks Like."

Layoff Lit

For many, the recession has meant a de-railed career, a dented (or worse) savings account, and a discouraging amount of free time. But these sly foxes profiled by the New York Times were clever enough to complete an unemployment oeuvre while they waited out the economic slump.

Luckily for the genre of "layoff lit," some pretty important people got the ax over the past year or so - the type of people who get a book deal out of it.

Dominique Browning, former editor in chief of House & Garden magazine, lost her job
and "won a life" according to her new book's jacket. I personally think that saccharine quip alone should automatically ban her from the world of literature, but I'm not the one who gets to make those calls. So, Ms. Browning will release her memoir in May, 2010.

Alexandra Penney, the former editor in chief of Self magazine, lost all her savings to Madoff. This doesn't count as a layoff but she did have to sell two of her houses! Voila; next month: “The Bag Lady Papers.” Penny has also been writing for The Daily Beast about her epic struggle, which has included giving up her cleaning lady and taking the subway for the first time in 30 years.

Of course, any writer in financial doubt should really just give in and turn to the ever-stable Romance genre... as we saw back in April, it's utterly Recession-proof!