So, the country's tenuous grip on an economy is slowly being pried away finger by finger and all I can think about is Delta Air Lines. I recently flew with Delta. They left almost an entire plane's worth of bags at a different airport in a different country. Their promise after much griping from our collected group of disenfranchised passengers was that our bags would arrive at said airport 24 hours later. This was explained with a certain sense of triumph for the efficiency of their problem-solving. Seeing as my wife and I and many of the other passengers would no longer be on dry land in eight hours, it meant we would all be without clean clothes for the next four days. Somewhat paraphrasing Caddyshack's Ty Webb, or Basho, solutions that have the same result as no solution are not solutions.

I want you to remember this story as a metaphor. When a resolution about the debt ceiling is announced in a few days, which no one will really be happy about. Please think of our lost luggage. When you are told that the the jobless rate jumping up to 10 bps is a good thing because it means more unemployed people are confidently looking for jobs, remember this. And when the CMBS delinquency rate is down 23 bps last month, but we're told you probably should worry a little bit about that, because it's not exactly representative of the market, remember my bags.

And as the verdicts pour in about QE2, and we rejoice that at least interest rates haven't grown because of it, as was feared, while the help really didn't trickle down to the broader economy, just think of all these things as your clean clothes.

This is all just spin. A roundtable of hoteliers that I sat down with last month were confident about business travel, but had fears about the employment rates. This is something that directly affects their business, as one of them put it simply: "Unemployed people don't vacation." Businesses are thriving because they learned to work on leaner budgets, so profits are growing, in spite of a laggard economy. But no amount of spin will make up for people working, spending money on sushi at Duane Reade, renting office space and going on vacation. Only jobs will get people spending that money again, not esoteric reports with the right spin.

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