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Lucky for us. Better high employment and high prices than no employment and cheap houses.

But I'd really prefer high employment and low house prices. One can always dream.

Google's impending doom will destroy life as we know it in San Francisco. o. wait.

There's no doom per se coming from Google.

But just like Microsoft and Oracle, their growth will have to stabilize before the next boom cycle. Another way to grow is to merge with smaller entities. In any case, I think they have too much growth factored into the share price. They did a nice comeback last week, though.

No offense Fonzarelli but you are a relative newcomer. Some (many) of these posters were predicting serious doom and gloom scenarios for Google, in short order.

You know what, I was predicting Amazon's going out of business in 2002, then predicting Google's doom in 2005.

Now, I stopped predicting dooms. Who knows, maybe I was just a couple of hundreds of years too early.

And here's a good quote from the article:

"Housing affordability is a challenge to our economic competitiveness," Levy said. "Lower housing prices, while painful to people, overall are helpful to the Bay Area by restoring some measure of affordability. You cannot run an economy, even in the Bay Area, with housing prices that are four times the national average. The salaries here are not four times the national average."

If one reads the story, one will see a slight problem calling the SF Bay Area "safe"

But a whopping chunk of the collective sales comes from the top revenue makers. The top five companies by revenue - Chevron, Hewlett-Packard, McKesson, Wells Fargo and Safeway - together raked in $524.1 billion, more than half the collective revenues for the entire list. Add in the next five by revenue - Intel, Cisco, Apple, Oracle and Google - and the total comes to $664.2 billion, fully two-thirds of the 200 companies' overall revenue.

SO let's word it differently
Oil company
Computer
Healthcare
banking
supermarket
(so pretty diverse, the top 5 companies)

but then:
computer
computer
computer
computer
computer

hmmm... I feel like there is a pattern.

please someone remind me, what happens to capex during national recessions?
and what happens to tech spending when capex spending changes?

Where's Bechtel? Is it not top 10 Bay Area? How can that be?

This is for public companies, fluj. Bechtel is still privately owned.

@ex-SF: You haven't heard the latest theories from the Google Industrial Complex. In a recession, you see, "people" will search/click on different things (soup lines, foreclosure specialists, used clothing stores), so the advertising money will simply come from somewhere else.

There is also a theory that more unemployment will
create "social networking shutins" (everyone hanging on facebook/twitter/linked in/youtube looking for work, posting more videos) increasing the value/advertising spend on those networks.

I'm not making this up (how could I?), but it's important to realize there are people who believe this (and are buying property), so until there is a *real recession* don't expect bargains...

Again, use google's relative stock price as your (patented) lazy-person's real-estate indicator.

:)