Lower-paid jobs in the suburbs increasingly are being taken by people in the city who can't afford to live in the suburbs.

Business visitors, tourists, students - in the context of New York all those are sizable streams of people. The city has 60,000 hotel rooms, and with an average occupancy of 80 percent, that's 40 to 50,000 people right there.

Why hasn't the end come? Land gets recycled.

A lot of people who get laid off from corporate jobs end up doing some freelance work, ... But people who are coming from a job with a paycheck are not knowledgeable about the expenses they can file on Schedule C. They should familiarize themselves with those deductions. If they have considerable self-employment income, they can set up a Keogh or SEP IRA to shelter some of the income from taxes.

Laying-off permanent workers is so difficult and costly that companies have a strong preference for temp jobs, even if it is at the expense of productivity. When labor protection has become excessive and unaffordable, as it is in France, labor market institutions must be reformed.

Those teams are playing for their jobs, which makes it even harder to play against them ... because everybody is committed.