A report from the Framingham Fed

My personal economic indicators:

• Traffic is brutal!  Normally, things start to slow down this time of year, as the college students leave town and the rest of us take vacations.  Not this year...my commute going against traffic on 128 is usually 35-40 minutes.  The last three weeks it has been over an hour.  I've been doing this drive off-and-on for 20 years, and traffic has always been a very good economic indicator.
• Headhunters have been calling.  As a computer hardware engineer, things were flying in the late '90's and even into 2000 and 2001.  Then, it was as dry as the Sahara Desert for a few years.  Now, there seems to be more demand than supply of experienced engineers in my field, as the phone and email have been buzzing.
• We're avid skiers, and own a small house in Vermont that we love to get away to whenever there's time.  We also rent it on vrbo.com to help pay the bills. (Vermont is a wonderful but very socialist state, with a perverse system of paying for education, leading to ridiculous real estate tax bills in ski towns like Stowe.  But that's for another blog post.)  Our calendar is almost full this summer, far and away our best in the five years that we've had the house.  We even raised prices, hoping to discourage bargain-hunters and save some weekends for our own use!
• My co-worker just moved to a bigger house in a better town.  He sold his old house in four days:  day 1, listing; day 2, broker tour; day 3, open house with multiple offers above asking; day 4, signed the papers. (added 6/29/11)

Massachusetts is loaded with high-tech and other knowledge industries, and was hit hard by the 2001 recession.  However, we're much less dependent on housing and building than the Sun Belt, and have weathered "The Great Recession" better than our unfortunate brethren in Las Vegas, Florida, and Arizona.  Based on on my own observations, it seems that the local economy is really starting to pick up steam. Tweet