flipspiceland

Will It Be a Merry Monday?

How many small businesses rely on large companies to survive?

Half? 3//4?

Small businesses will fail leaving only those that basically take in each other's laundry without a sea-change in employment prospects that are genuine, not simply a series of government generated make-work opportunities which, while helpful in the short run, masks the fatal issue of the export of jobs which make things. If we are to believe it, this model developed at the B schools which haven't any incentive yet to change their curriculum and traitorous professors who have made their fortunes by preaching a "Play Piano", economy.

Three economies exist in the U.S.(and elsewhere). The international one, wherein the likes of Coca-cola USX, Accenture, derive most of their employment, revenue and growth outside the borders of the U.S. The second comprises the domestic only economy and consists of businesses and employees that buy all their products and services inside our borders. The third is a mix of the other two where some sales (and purchases) are domestic and foreign.

Until the relationship between these three begins to swing in the direction of domestic employment, the slide into third world status is assured, and can already be seen in the steel and auto towns that have been devastated, where the population lives in abject poverty generation upon generation, bringing with it all the problems and tragedies associated with kids with guns.

Friday Outlook: Scroogy Swap Prices Darken Christmas

I don't know exactly why, but your summaries are one of the rare few that make any sense to me. It's not that your thoughts agree with my own predisposition, but your way of making me think about it in a new way.

You do not have to 'apologize' for your providing non-filtered MSM 'news'. It is a welcome relief.

I am considering subscribing to your services and wonder if you provide a sample, an objective one, of your calls in the last year.

Thanks for this blog though, as I have learned more in two of your missives than I have all year from any other source.

Bernanke Is Not the Problem

Those opposed to getting rid of Bernanke must all be government workers, or Union workers, wherein they should never be fired for gross incompetence.

Does anyone here know what Bernanke was doing prior to the melt down? His position on interest rates? Just how much he has contributed to creating this ruinous mess for the middile class, primarily? And to think for a second that Greenspan had nothing to do with this ongoing crisis that has yet to take all its victims is astonishing.

It's hard to digest to take seriously someone who blames institutions instead of the certain men and women for failing. An intsitution is nothing more than an assembly of people who make decisions. It is Paulson, Greenspan, Bernanke, Geithner, Kashkari, Gensler, Fuld, O'neal, Madoff, and all the rest of the tribe who brought this Sword of Damocles down upon the global economy, and who continue to occupy positions of power, despite their utter failures.

The apologists here make me nauseous.

Why Bank of America Paid Back the Money

This is ridiciulous. You say that they, (who is they??) are paying back the money to rid themselves of Exec Pay restrictions BUT they are harming the company in the process.

Since "they" are intentionally harming BOA why is the government permitting them to do do? The idea of giving TARP money and allowing the banks to run without interference from the government thanks to lobbyists, shysters, and complicit perps like Hank Paulson, is preposterous on its face.

B of A should fall under the sword, be divested of Merrill, and broken up into a dozen other pieces to rid us, the wildly enraged opposition to TARP and bonus money paid to these avaricious, arrogant thieves, of the TBTF monstrosities.

Another Crisis Looms Right Around the Corner

If I decide to take $100,000 in credit lines at 0 per cent for 1 year, and 'invest' it in Brazilian CDs at 4% and the dollar suddenly
rises by 20%, why shouldn't I as a trader, get the wind knocked out of me? If someone is foolish enough to lend me that $100,000 with NO COLLATERAL, who's the patsy here?

The Carry trade shouldn't worry anyone enough to panic, provided the banks who are lending this money are not taking their depositors' cash, and/or borrowing it from the FED to lend to me and then when I fail, to stick the rest of the population with the tab thru government sponsored bailouts.

Why a Market Crash Doesn’t Matter

Actually, only 50% of the people in this country work. You could paint the entire state of Florida jet black, but how much significance does that have?

What's of more importance is how much of the economy is driven by those who do not work for a living? Between students, retirees on SoSo Security, railroad pensioners, teachers, the ill, the permanent underclass that subsists for 4 generations on wealth transfers, former government workers, etc. there are 145,000,000 people in this country who do not work at a job.

Unemployment must be considered in light of an economy that, somehow, has managed to function with fully 50% of its people
not in the work force, but at least surviving if not thriving.

I'd love to see the economic impact of 145,000,000 people who do no work, but are every seceond exchanging their money for whatever it is they need or want.


On Nov 23 04:49 AM Kolk Abuk wrote:

> Have a look at this unemployment map with time elapse:
>
> cohort11.americanobser...
>
>
> By the county, nationally. It's kind of scary looking.

UNG Trading 101

Gambling surrounds us on all sides, top and bottom.

Most people do not realize how much they are gambling every day of their lives for as long as they live. Simply driving to the store in a car is major gamble but no one seems to realize it. And speaking of living, the fact that we exist is the result of 1 sperm of 350,000,000 +- happening upon one specific egg. The other 349,999,999 all lost big time, never to be.

When you really think about it the entire universe is a gamble and everything in it.

Forsake peceived certainty, embrace chance.




On Sep 05 08:42 AM azzkikr wrote:

> none of you are investors, you're all gamblers. Why don't you just
> go to Vegas and at least get some free drinks while you lose, lose,
> lose.

Two Economies, And One Must Die

It's all about jobs, work, stuff to do that has to get done. Real jobs are disappearing at an alarming rate, but the world population continues to grow, while tens of millions of rural farmers are migrating to cities for less onerous work and finding nothing.

Without massive, global job creation, there is nothing but disaster ahead---unless a new economy is invented, one that does not require work to survive and/or prosper.

That may be the biggest job of all, somehow living a life without work but doing so with dignity, decent food, clothing, and shelter.

Obama Wants a 'Better Plan'? Here's One: Bite the Bullet

What has the banking system go to do with creating jobs? Except for people in banking, which has seen and will see continued consolidation, and therefore less jobs, we are losing irreplacable work.

There's just not enough work to do at decent pay. Genuine, productive work. As our Humanbeing/machine homo sapiens species has invented tool after tool to make work less burdensome, and continues to roboticize everything, not enough new 'work' has been created to employ the net millions every year that are coming 'on line'. It strikes me that so many people now, if they lose their jobs, cannot replace them. Ever.

This has been happening for some time. But we are only at the beginning of an burgeoning number of people who cannot find similar work at similar pay---even well-trained ones whose industries either migrate, get absorbed or die off. The jobs they had are gone. If it is truly due to demand destruction, instead of 'demand delay', then there is more, much more global strife ahead.

The interconnectedness of government sponsored employment, like the Defense Department, which leeches hundreds of thousands of career opportunities out into the private sector, is not hard to see. Cutting budgets for just about anything then results in more unemployment. This is a real dilemna.

It seems that creating good jobs with decent pay (a factor of supply/demand if ever there was one, i.e., the less Computer Engineers there are the higher the pay for the existing one; the less burger-flippers there are, the more they get paid) is where the real crux of the problem lies, not in banking systems.

If we do not have entrepeneurs, real job generators/creators, (not just folks who quit working for another and essentially go self-employed like the lawyer who does not want to work for a large firm and goes solo, essentially buying a job) if we do not have meaningful work to be accomplished by the millions and billions, what does the future hold?

In the absence of new employment, a new paradigm may have to be born--providing for the life-time unemployed in some semblance of middle class living, forever. Otherwise, bloody revolution is around that corner.

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

No b/ruptcy as far as the eye can see. It will be talked about as it has for two years running now.

But it will not happen as long as the democrats (and republicans) control congress, and the White house.

It's all just trash talk.

AIG Exec Departures: What a Surprise!

Maybe what we need is total transparency and come honcho from Wall Street to tell us honestly about the construction of AIG and how it needs to be de-conglomerated, each unit split off so that WE the Owners can see what WE bought through our surrogates in Congress. Or is that too much for them to do?


On Mar 26 11:31 AM I weep for this country. wrote:

> People we own AIG! Why are we trying to destroy it? It should be
> unamerican to bash the good people at AIG who are now working there
> knowing how bad they are perceived and yet staying loyal to the company.
> Keeping good employees who see some future in their current roles
> in the only way we will see any of that money that Congress decided
> to give to Goldman and France. Remember the people who caused the
> crisis left! And most of AIG is made up of good, solid insurance
> units that up until now were making money. But this grandstanding
> is now hurting that part of the business that had nothing to do with
> Financial Products whatsoever and which hold the key to taxpayers
> recouping what the Fed gave to the counterparties!

Bernanke Seems Clueless About the Real State of the Economy

He did not actually say that. His escape hatch was the qualification that if EVERYTHING they are doing works perfectly, we may improve this year.

While I think along with just about everyone else (with the exception of those who had him appointed him to first protect their wealth, and forget about the people) that he's made one wrong move after another, he has only continued following the one most responsible for the demise of the global economy, Herr King Greenspan. And that is surely as telling about his real motives than anything else he has done or will do.

The FED now has more power than even Greenspan did. Why? Why?
Why?

How Innovation Sustains Prosperity

One aspect that is overlooked is population. The world has too many people who need something constructive to do, nowhere to go to do it, and who don't have the skills, motivation or invention to do it with. At the rate some countries have been reproducing, abject poverty must surely be everywhere on an afterburner trajectory to the moon.

What are we to do with all the displaced workers and the millions a year, net of deaths, now being born?

There are hundreds of millions in China, throw in India, and Africa and we are looking at a billion people who are doing little more than turning oxygen into carbon dioxide.

There does not appear to be enough 'innovation' in the last 50 years to keep our billions employed. Now what?

The innovation we now desperately need is an 'invention' to put these people to work. The laid off autoworker and/or banking employee is but a speck in the eye of a newt compared to the number of jobs the world needs. The growth of government employment on the other hand is and has been attracting the 'least' of us and is growing like a virus and just as deadly to innovation.

Our next revolutionary invention had better be the creation of a variety of innovative techniques to avoid a bloody revolution on several continents. We can't all become grant writers in order to get 'free' money from the government (from ourselves).

Acknowledging Our 'Animal Spirits'

We have seen and now are living thru the results of the manic assembly and construction of large entities either by organic growth or acquisition, (led by none other than the investment banks whose principals have extracted trillions in personal compensation for sowing the seeds of destruction with their feverish M & A activity these last 40 years). One being the One-World government onslaught, and the other being corporations merging, buying up or raiding other corporations in the past (and now very subdued) current conglomeration mania.

The United States cannot be governed either. It is far too complicated and diverse to be governed affectively and getting even more so. It is all one can do to even govern a single family, a single state, municipality, or city let alone a leviathan that grows so large it more resembles a malignant tumor that has only one outcome. And the arrogant big-brained elite think they can govern a whole world?

As we go through the next decade and see more and more of the devastation that will take place, perhaps this elite will see the wisdom of
reversing the kind of growth that has set us up for financial, social, governmental and institutional ruin, that this 'cloning' model has contracted a virulent disease that cannot be contained and like all offspring of a clone has no defense against the common cold, let alone a fatal cancer. Hopefully before it's too late for us to step back from the fate that befell the dinosaurs, a return to models that are smaller and more manageable, even if at less profit , will be seen as our only salvation.

Time to break the dish, re jigger and assemble the pieces into smaller but more nourishing plates.

Size matters.









G.E. is a perfect example of the fruit of Jack Welch's efforts for however many years he ran the place. Into the ground as it stands now. That he was rewarded by incentives that made him a billionaire, and gutted the operations as it now appears, turning it into a bank, will likely not be required case study at Harvard and other instituitons that

Auto Sales Continue to Slide Downhill

Anyone who is shocked about the poor auto sales numbers lives in a bubble.

Take your own most pessimistic stance, factor in the bullshit the politicians are telling us, add in the gross incompetence, vanity, and utter lack of responsibility of multimillion dollar salaried and perked talking heads that pass for CEOs (ask yoursef how Nardelli got that job -(AND 250,000,000 goodbye money at Chrysler after ruining Home Depots' shareholders,What in hell is up with that?--you will find lawyers and agents selling him to others like a branded toothpaste).

Or you could just walk into any of a dozen auto dealerships and se that they are selling few cars. IBWA --invest by walking around).