Recession Schme-cession

I've been reticent to accept the idea of a recession since they've made up all the hoopla a few years ago. Today, something really clicked for me to help me justify my disbelief. Oddly, it was in the form of a Black Eyed Peas song, but that's not important.

I read something about counter-cultural economics a while back and it described "counter-culture" as the purest form of free enterprise. While most counter-cultural groups feel like they are acting in rebellion and outside of The Establishment, I feel like they are acting within the same sociological parameters. I can relate to the early skateboarding culture, so I'm going to use them as my illustrative example.

One of the things about skateboarding was it's outlet of aggression... there was music and fashion that embodied that "culture" and there was a disdain from the inside for people who appropriated the look --and they were labeled "posers". One of the big things that skateboarders suffer from is the adequecy of shoes to withstand the abuse of the griptape. A few people "capitalized" (oh snap!) on that need and made shoes for skateboarders. Vision Street Wear and Vans were the most popular. These shoes appropriated styles from "Punk" fashion and became an emblem of rebellion and antidisestablishmentarianism (never thought I would use that word to actually express myself...HAHAHA!!!). Skip ahead 25 years and Vans shoes are a huge shoe company and it seems that anyone under 30 has a pair.

Now if we spin this idea out a little bit and pay attention to what indicators are used to describe a recession we might see that the "recession" is really just an unsettling of what some people feel is foundation of their corporate progress.

Wall Street is a large group of incorporated businesses. Sole proprietorships and partnerships are not part of the Wall Street economic engine and so the life of these businesses do not contribute to the numbers that account for the activity of said "engine", but they can take away from it. While there are a number of other factors that have contributed to the upset of our National economic engine, I think that independent businesses and localized spending are becoming more of a trend amongst our consumptive practices, therefore not registering in the realms of Wall Street's books and ledgers. The money is still here, it just circulates differently. While it is circulating differently, the larger companies are feeling a loss at some level and raise their prices which takes from our collective gain as individuals, because we still use plenty of the products and resources supplied by those large corporations, (even in the production of our independent products and services). And so what we have are these large companies making headlines about losses and those losses "trickle down" in the form of inflation.

I'm not sure if I'm right about this or if I'm expressing myself clearly, but it makes perfect sense to me. Please comment.