Uneven Start to 2014

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After the unusually busy holiday season at the end of 2013, I thought January would come out of the gate roaring. Instead it slept about a week, woke up for a while, then slept again until late in the month.

I’m talking about more than the volume of job and contract openings advertised. A lot of existing projects seemed slow to ramp up after the New Year.

Part of the reason seems to be illness. This year an especially virulent strain of influenza is making the rounds. It is killing people in their prime—so far three people my family knows have died from it, and they weren’t in the usual high risk categories. All of the deaths we’ve heard of so far were among people who did not get vaccinated.

This affects business. One of my contract renewals was delayed because the woman handling it ended up in intensive care with the flu. (We believe she’s pulling through.) Of course that isn’t the only culprit. A hospital near me got a wave of norovirus last month, as well as a common cold that lingers for weeks.

Now that I think about it, the business pattern has more or less reflected incubation times for these waves of illness.

In that case, some unevenness in the resumption of business is not cause for long term worry. Most people who have bouts with these diseases will get well. Enough is going around to perhaps show up in lower productivity and economic figures than expected for a couple of months.

I see more than sufficient business activity to say we’re still on the upswing.

The USA may pause to catch its breath. Everybody may get distracted by the winter Olympics. There may be a dent in the numbers due to illnesses.

But on the whole it’s a decent economic picture for the time being. After what we went through in recent years, I hope we will all make hay while the sun is shining.

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