The housing bubble was first pricked in Miami condos in 2006 and tourism statewide in Florida is down about three percent this December from last. But you wouldn't know it from the stuffed Alaska Airlines flight to Miami or the discouraging realization at Hertz's lot near Miami International Airport that all the cars are checked out--even for "Gold Club" members with reservations. In Miami, supposedly Number One Hertz, indeed, is a metaphor for a straining Boom--too many customers, apparently, and exasperated clerks. It doesn't look or feel like an eagerly aspiring company that is worried about staying on top.
Up the coast in Boca Raton you can barely find a shopping cart at the Publix supermarket. The out-of-town papers from New York, Toronto and London are nearly all snapped up. A "Help Wanted" sign pleads for attention at the Cote France sidewalk cafe nearby in Royal Palm Plaza.
Here is an enterprising "mere et papa" place along a sidewalk that really does suggest Nice in the summer--shadowy porticos, some blocks back from the beach, palm trees. The pastries and people-watching make you want to linger and savor. There is still a line at 2 p.m. and a bit of jostle when I come back at night. Don't these people know that times are tough?
In the sunny mid-day, here come a pair of face-lifted ladies "of a certain age", each walking a poodle. And there, across the street at 7 p.m., is a lively scene in front of Lemongrass Bistro, where lovely, noisy twenty-somethings seem blissfully unaware of the financial depredations of that local country club scoundrel, Bernie Madoff.
Pull up a chair, order a Tarte Tartin and pull out a paperback copy of Amity Schlaes' The Forgotten Man, "A New History of the Great Depression." It is comprehensive, readable and surprisingly droll. It will get you out of your funk about the economy and make you realize that our present difficulties are very different from those that produced hard times in the 1930s. Yet there are so many lessons in these pages, too, that make the book pertinent. Such as, 1) the importance of predictable policies and the danger of experimental ones; 2) The need for encouraging, rather than punishing, private investment, and; 3) The genius of the American economy that really does not need instruction from overseas.
"What a time we live in!" a local exclaims to me. "You put money in the bank and they give you 1.5 percent!"
"Be glad if your money at least is safe," I smile, and go back to my book.
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