Stumped By The Slump

By Daniel Kadlec With Reporting by Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas, Unmesh Kher/New York, Laura A. Locke/San Francisco and Siobhan Morrissey/Miami

With half his department recently laid off and his employer's budget for next year shrinking, Randy Holyfield, an executive for a nonprofit group in Highlands Ranch, Colo., was desperately seeking a safety net. He found one in his home. Holyfield refinanced his mortgage at the lowest rates in 30 years, cashing out a $40,000 cushion while holding his monthly payment steady. "The newspapers say unemployment is still low," offers Holyfield, 43. "Well, I have friends out of work, and others who had to leave the state for a job. It's worse than the numbers indicate."

Millions of homeowners are doing what Holyfield did, using their home as a bank to bridge tough times. Never before in a recession have so many had so much equity in their homes and the means to get at it. This unprecedented safety net of some $4 trillion to $5 trillion has softened the blow of the recession--which has been highly unusual in many other ways as well.

Start with what got us here. Businesses overspent to build things like PCs, Internet switches and routers, as well as speedy fiber-optic lines. That spending helped fuel the boom. But once corporate tech budgets tightened, tech stocks plummeted, and so did spending among consumers who held those stocks. Suddenly, those consumers felt much poorer. Typically, cycles work the other way. Robust consumer spending at the height of a boom induces businesses to build more plants at just the wrong moment--when the Federal Reserve is ready to dampen the whole party with higher interest rates to root out inflation.

So this recession has been backward from the beginning. Record layoffs have not stalled a torrid housing market. Those who keep their jobs are nonetheless getting hit hard this time because their bonuses, their profit sharing and even their salaries are being cut. Perhaps most revealing: technology, the industry that was supposed to end boom-bust cycles, made this one even worse.

There's good news too. The recession, which began in March and was officially declared on Nov. 26, already appears to be lifting. Last week came reports that housing starts and permits rose sharply in November. Home-builder stocks, classic early movers, have been on a tear. With the end in sight, here are some lasting lessons from an odd economic downturn:

Your home is your bank

Spurred by low interest rates and the desire or need to tap their most valuable asset, Americans this year refinanced more than $1.1 trillion of mortgages--roughly a fifth of all mortgage debt. In 65% of cases, homeowners borrowed more than they owed and used the difference to pay down credit-card debt, finance a home improvement or build a cushion for tough times. It's a low-risk way to get cash. "Very rarely have home values declined nationally, though pockets can take a hit," notes Dan Gilbert, ceo of Quickenloans.com

For a brief time in the 1990s, Americans had more equity in the stock market than they had in their homes. They have since learned that home values are far more stable and that their home remains a core investment.

The Fed influences consumers more than businesses

Classic recessions start with the Fed fearing inflation and aggressively raising interest rates to choke off excess business investment. They end with the Fed defeating the inflation foe and slowly cutting rates again. This one started with inflation practically nil and the Fed in neutral. With no inflation threat--indeed, with deflation the bigger worry in some camps--the Fed has been aggressively cutting rates. Those cuts are working to stimulate the economy, but not in the usual way.

Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and company have chopped the benchmark federal funds rate 11 times this year, to 1.75%. In the last recession, the rate fell only to 3%. "This is unlike anything we've seen in the postwar period," says economist Stephen Roach at Morgan Stanley. Recessions that spring from manic business overbuilding, such as this one, were more common before World War II and proved then to be far more difficult to correct, lasting on average about twice as long as recessions caused by Fed rate hikes, Roach notes.

Why? Ordinarily, low interest rates encourage businesses to borrow and build. No matter how low interest rates go, though, that won't happen now until existing capacity has been put to use.

But low rates are working--mainly by keeping mortgages affordable, which has kept the housing market bustling and homeowners feeling a reserve of wealth. With long-term rates surging lately, homeowners are switching to hybrid mortgages that offer a fixed rate for the first few years and then adjust every year after that, and are still finding great terms. The trick now is to get businesses investing again before homeowners exhaust what they're willing to spend of their housing wealth.

Even with a job, you may suffer

They have long known this on Wall Street, where year-end bonuses can make up almost all of annual compensation. But this is the first recession since flexible compensation took hold throughout the work force in the '90s. A Fed survey shows that 95% of companies now give a year-end bonus, stock options, profit sharing or commission payments--up from 65% five years ago. Many companies offer such flexible pay to employees well below top management, and typically this compensation falls in bad times.

Ford has announced that there will be no annual bonus for executives and managers and that profit-sharing disbursements, if any, will be unusually low. Meanwhile, the second consecutive year of a declining stock has taken all the gain out of many employees' stock options. Some employers, like Acxiom in Conway, Ark., and Montrose Travel in Montrose, Calif., have even cut workers' pay across the board as much as 15%.

Flexible compensation helps companies cut costs and hold on to more employees, but because of this new pay structure, personal income will fall by $30 billion in the first quarter, estimates Goldman Sachs.

Low unemployment rates can hide job churn--and pain

The recession of 1990-91 resulted in unemployment of 7.8%, and the one before that 10.8%. The rate today is confoundingly tame at just 5.7%. Still, nearly 2 million jobs have been cut this year. That's triple any year in at least a decade. So the low unemployment rate is masking painful job churn and insecurity.

Tom Humanek is one victim--and an example of why the unemployment figure isn't higher. In October, he shut his trade consulting practice in Fort Myers, Fla., because business dried up after Sept. 11. An accountant, he is currently temping for Robert Half International, assigned at the moment to a property-management company. "I was making $100 an hour," he says of his old practice. "I make 15% of that now." Humanek, 54, was expecting a lean Christmas.

Charles Vipperman, 36, lost his job in a way that has become increasingly common. A financial analyst with Sunglass Hut in Coral Gables, Fla., he was let go after the company was bought by competitor Luxottica, which owns LensCrafters of Cincinnati, Ohio. "We arrived at work, and there was a message on our answering machines to go to a hotel," he recalls. "The room you were directed to determined whether you were invited to stay."

One factor working against Vipperman was that he was stationed so far from the new company headquarters in Ohio. "It's much easier to lay off people you don't know and never see than the ones you have looked in the eye," says John Challenger, ceo of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

He attributes the record layoffs this year mainly to Sept. 11 and the sudden recession--and also to 20 years of merger mania that has made companies far bigger and more impersonal. One result: "People are now fully donning the free-agent mantle," Challenger says.

Employees no longer have a company; they just have a function. An accountant or human resources professional can do just as well at Sears as at Cisco, which explains why 41% of people who switched employers last quarter also switched industries.

Many without jobs don't qualify for unemployment benefits

Sean Bassett, 27, earned a great living as a network administrator for Silicon Valley's biggest companies. He was on track to make $150,000 a year before the tech meltdown. The only job Bassett has had since April is as a bartender. As an independent contractor, he had been part of the fastest-growing segment of the labor force. Yet it is one whose workers often don't qualify for unemployment benefits. Only 39% of unemployed Americans looking for jobs collect unemployment benefits--down from 50% in 1975, says the Labor Department.

Roughly 20% of the labor force is ineligible, including temps, part-timers, subcontractors and the self-employed. Even some full-time workers are disqualified if they didn't work enough months at their last job before losing it. In 30 states, you don't qualify if you are willing to accept only part-time work, a restriction plainly out of sync with today's flexible work force.

The 401(k) that made you feel rich can make you feel poor

In the 1990s, 401(k) plans replaced traditional pensions for many workers and became the main savings vehicle for many more. Underpinning the 401(k) was a guaranteed return for most participants in the form of company-contributed shares of stock. As the bull market roared, 401(k) assets soared, and almost no one bothered to check what was in the account. An ever increasing portion, naturally, was employer stock.

Such was the case for Tom Padgett, a lab technician at a subsidiary of energy-trader Enron. As Enron's high-flying stock dived from $90 to less than $1, his account balance fell from $650,000 to $11,000. Last week two Democratic Senators, Barbara Boxer of California and Jon Corzine of New Jersey, introduced a bill to limit 401(k) assets to no more than 20% in a single stock. Many plans have more than 50% in one stock; some, more than 80%. Workers everywhere are on notice that the risks are great for anyone with one large holding.

The business cycle lives

Technology was supposed to make companies more productive and smooth the economic cycle, in part by instantly matching inventories with demand. No more boom, no more bust. But the very technology that was supposed to achieve all those advances had its own boom and bust and greatly exaggerated the up and down legs of the broader economic cycle.

Overbuilding, even of must-have products, can throw the economy into recession as surely as overbuilding of cars or offices. It all comes down to what the consumer will pay for. And in the Internet boom, "there was a false belief that businesses could continue to buy productivity-enhancing devices and invent consumption," says Joe Battipaglia, market strategist at Gruntal. A prominent bull even through the bear market, Battipaglia has learned how dramatically things can change. So should we all, so that in the next recession we can make different mistakes.

--With reporting by Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas, Unmesh Kher/New York, Laura A. Locke/San Francisco and Siobhan Morrissey/Miami