Harbingers and omens

I look in life for harbingers. I accept but fear omens.

Both are a bit like a crystal ball in that they allow a view into the future but unlike the witches on the heath, who use toads and newts, they use events to suggest in outlines and shadow other events to come.

So I saw a bar graph put out by the University of Michigan that measured popular expectations of unemployment in the months ahead. Roughly 64% of those surveyed saw job losses coming.

What is potentially significant about that is that there has not been such a dramatic spike in skepticism since the economic meltdown of 2008.

In the years since, popular sentiment has roughly predicted the actual unemployment rate but, like a fun-house mirror, exaggerated it up or down.

I mentioned the graph to our news page editor, who had himself seen harbingers.

On local television, he has seen a sharp increase in ads from outfits offering to cash out your home no matter the state of repair.

If, rather than selling stuff, advertisers are buying the one last valuable thing people have, then they too are betting on hard times to come.

And another gauge of mass sentiment — the amorphous, rough mega-mind — the percentage of people opting for variable rate loans has spiked, also to levels not seen since just before the economic storm of 2008. Borrowers are betting on a drop in interest rates that would accompany an economic stall.

And yet as you look around, people have money to spend.

I took a bicycle ride to our photo studio on Sunday and passing a block of old and comfortable apartments where I used to live I saw two people stepping out of different cars with food delivery packages in their hands, at almost exactly the same time within a distance of 20 feet.

I wondered, under my curmudgeonly helmet, is it so hard to make breakfast?

Along that line, DoorDash is now allowing its customers to pay for their take-out meal over the course of four months. A perfectly thoughtful and organized employee here at Courthouse News said she had used that option because, “It hurts less.”

Then last week I drove east from Pasadena to a Japanese hairdresser’s salon, delivering four boxes of books of my dad’s black and white photos from Paris in the 1940s. The hairdresser had decorated her salon with large canvas prints from the same images. I published way too many of the books so she gives them away to her clients at a good clip.

After dropping them off, I drove back west along Foothill Boulevard, a gritty street of car repair shops and small industrial businesses where there also happens to be an In-N-Out on the south side of the street.

It was a beautiful, cool, fall evening. I had the windows down in my old Audi. I was in no hurry after a hard day that included working with our lawyers on an upcoming Ninth Circuit argument over press access to new pleadings.

As I passed the In-N-Out, it took me a moment to realize that about three blocks worth of headlights — a line of a good 50 cars with engines idling — were not in a traffic jam. They were waiting to buy burgers.

Maybe not much of a harbinger. But people are still spending money.

If an economic convulsion is foretold in the people’s loosely connected mass mind, then it is being sensed without any accompanying need for privation.

So the economic engine’s gears may well keep grinding.

But for the current national administration, the growing blob of mass malaise could be an omen. An omen in my view is more powerful than a harbinger, it is a deep warning.

It comes alongside recent resignations and election losses and a presidential approval rating on the verge of dropping into the 30s. Within the dominant political party, the signs should be seen with foreboding, portents of what is in store for them in the next couple election cycles, a spectral hand showing the way out of power.