ActBrilliant!

After you send your support to Haiti , take comfort and find hope in Michael Franti's song

No dead bull here

My headline isn't a joke, but it isn't a general statement either. It's borne of one simple fact; when I was in Aruba last week, the place was mobbed, maybe not quite as crowded as Times Square on New Year's, but....there wasn't a hotel room to be had (and they run $500.00 minimum per night for that week); there wasn't a seat in a decent restaurant to be had before 10 PM; and on New Year's Eve the Maitre d's at our hotel's restaurants told us that they couldn't accommodate us for dinner- they were booked solid (and one of them was charging $200.00 a head.)

"Where's the recession?" I asked the hotel manager who hosted a small get-together while I was there. "What do all these people do that they've not been affected?"

 Like me, it was possible that they all had a story to tell, but this didn't look like a crowd to whom vacationing in paradise was outside the norm. My proof? They had evening gowns and Manolos and metallic swimsuit cover-ups. They could make intimate comparisons betwen the hotels on the strip; it was obvious, they came here year after year; I was the exception.

The hotel manager reasoned that they'd all made, and paid for, their reservations a year in advance, but that didn't explain why the restaurants were so crowded and why places like Little Switzerland were mobbed.

"I buy myself a trinket every year," one woman explained to me on an elevator ride, "This year it's a Patek, water resistant," she said. I didn't show her my $59.00 Timex triathlete watch; it's waterproof.

Now tempted as I was to  interview the occupants of the chaise lounges who sat near me at the pool, I took a good look at what they were reading instead. I counted 20 copies of The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, twelve copies of Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity (Hardcover), and seven copies of Change of Heart.

I hadn't read any of the books, but I noticed that my husband had a copy of Conde Nast's Portfolio magazine and just my luck, it featured articles by, or about, two of these authors. I consider the articles extremely worthwhile reads. If you want to know how our economy got into this mess, read Michael Lewis' explanation here.

If you know why there were no signs of recession in Aruba, write me.