This morning's U.S. employment report showed a gain of 1,000 jobs in December, which sucks.
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I think I heard Krugman say, during an interview on NPR, that this was a *rich person's recovery* which appears to be the case so far.
The WSJ story I've copied below about industrial space vacancies is another indication of continued weakness at the ground level.
DRM
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Study Sees a Record For Industrial Space Vacancies
By RAY A. SMITH Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The average vacancy rate for the U.S. industrial real-estate market continued to rise in 2003, hitting its highest level in 23 years, while rents declined for a third consecutive year, a new report says.
The average vacancy rate for the top-50 metro markets in the U.S. ended 2003 at 11.8%, up from 11.2% in 2002, according to Reis Inc., a New York real-estate research firm. The 2003 rate is the highest since Reis began tracking the market in 1980. Rents for industrial space, meanwhile, fell to $4.55 a square foot from $4.57 in 2002.
So-called absorption of industrial space by companies was negative for the third year in a row. Negative absorption occurs when the amount of industrial space vacated exceeds the amount leased up and generally means demand for space is extremely weak. Still, the negative absorption in 2003 of four million square feet wasn't as bad as it was in 2002 and 2001, when it was a negative 17.3 million and 48.1 million, respectively.
"Demand is not as negative as it was, but the market overall is still weak," says Laura Stone, an industrial market economist at Boston-based real-estate research firm Torto Wheaton Research.
The industrial real-estate market has been suffering for the past three years as a result of the weak economy, which curtailed companies' needs for warehouse space for the distribution of goods as well as their need for research-and-development industrial space.
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URL -
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB107343814527459900,00.html