Less than zero.

The Bulletin has a full court press on the idea of 'recovery.'

Oh, my gosh, where to start.

"Signs of Stability Amid Another Decline."

I suppose a corpse looks pretty stable, until the rotting gases inside make the body jerk. O.K. That's overstating it. But lack of movement isn't stability.

Back when the sport card market began to collapse, it was a constant mantra for me to say, "It can't drop any further." Finally, Linda said to me, "Why can't it drop to zero?" I'd built four stores on top of a bubble, 8 employees, and me the Little Dutch Boy running around plugging holes. I had built the four stores with the thought that "even if" sales dropped in half, I could still pay the overhead.

And instead, I was seeing sales drop like a huge iron safe dropping through the floors of a building. The real floor, as it turned out, was the ground.

Oh, sure. I'd hear stories that 'other' shops were selling cards well, or that the national market was healthy, but for me? Once sales dropped below the level I could maintain the stores, they had dropped to --Less Than Zero.

The only thing for me to do was to close or sell the other three stores as fast as I could manage; and in the process I racked up credit card bills that took me another 10 years to pay off. -- Less Than Zero, as in 10's of thousands in debt.

Sports cards are still around, but sales dropped to Less Than Zero for one store after another, one sport card distributor after another, one card manufacturer after another. They disappeared into a black hole.

You can tell the public that sales are picking up, but if they are Less Than Zero for you, your friends and family, or your local neighbors, then such "stability" might as well be in China for all it matters.

"Building permits 'are so close to zero there's nowhere to go but up," quotes the Bulletin.

No. They can be Less Than Zero in effect; as in tearing down existing housing, as in brown lawns and peeling paint and squatters and crime, as in bankrupt furniture stores, as in repossessed boats and cars, as in FDIC takeover of banks, as in foreclosures flooding the market, as in intervention by the government.

(Paul-doh is saying the same thing better over on Bendbubble2.)

But I leave you with the thought -- oh, dear, how negative can I get? -- that it can indeed go somewhere else other than "up." It can go to Less Than Zero.