how bad the job market is for college graduates

From the NY Times - Thomas Friedman draws the wrong conclusion from it of course

Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, called the other day with these statistics about college graduates signing up to join her organization to teach in some of our neediest schools next year: “Our total applications are up 40 percent. Eleven percent of all Ivy League seniors applied, 16 percent of Yale’s senior class, 15 percent of Princeton’s, 25 percent of Spellman’s and 35 percent of the African-American seniors at Harvard. In 130 colleges, between 5 and 15 percent of the senior class applied.”

Put a Fork in this Rally

• The public is piling into the market.. and companies are selling.
• Oregon unemployment rate skyrockets in March, to 12.1% from 10.7% in February.
• The S&P has been bouncing back and forth since the fall.
• March sales of the Pontiac G3, a subcompact GM launched in February. In March the company sold 141.. That means just one in every 19 of GM’s roughly 2,700 Pontiac dealers sold one during the month. At the end of March, dealers had 3,479 G3s in stock, according to Autodata. That’s enough to last 617 days at the current rate of sales – close to two full years.
• More yellow weeds than green shoots in today’s data-flow
• The market is broken. Why does anyone think there is any equity in GM?Retail investors.
• How can anyone still think this is a liquidity crisis? When asset values get cut in half, how could that not cause a solvency crisis?
• Who is the IMF selling its huge block of gold to? Is that the exit strategy for elites?
• Anecdotally, people still think that the economy is going to "get back to normal", i.e. the bizarrely abnormal conditions that prevailed during the credit bubble. For example, on CRE deals I see people are reluctant to write leases longer than a few years at today's "depressed" prevailing rates. That leads to a greater supply overhang in the future when reality finally hits.
  
• In the first quarter of 2009, retail tenants vacated 8.7 million square feet nationwide, according to the latest report from Reis. That quarterly total exceeds the 8.6 million square feet vacated in all of 2008.
• Anyone who thinks that this is a "generational bottom" and is buying this rally is going to be carried out over the next year.

Supply of Auto Dealerships

According to the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), approximately 900 dealerships closed and 200 dealerships opened in 2008, for a net loss of 700 dealerships, leaving the country with approximately 20,000 franchised auto dealers. ... For 2009, the NADA forecasts a net loss of 900 additional dealerships.

According to CoStar Property Professional, 5.4% of auto dealership properties across the country are vacant and another 3.7% are available for lease, bringing total availability to 9.1%, or 1,023 "spaces" for lease; this compares to 3.5% vacancy about one year ago. Additionally, CoStar COMPS data shows that there are currently 1,861 auto dealership properties actively listed for sale across the country.

Unfortunately, CoStar's statistics show that auto dealership properties coming onto the market aren't going anywhere fast. The current "for sale" inventory not only dwarfs the number of auto lots that have sold so far this year (only 95), but is about equal to the total number of auto dealership properties that sold during 2008, 2007, and 2006 combined. Additionally, auto dealership properties currently for lease have already been on the market for an average of 9.6 months.