What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

Status
Not open for further replies.
He probably pointed out how Cuba managed to come up with a health care system that serves all its citizens, not just 80% of the country.

And you get your rice steamer and if you're really rich a '57 chevy that runs once or twice a year, if you can find gas...
 
Barack Hussein O'Hoover

‘Worst president since Hoover.”

Democrats have said this at one point or another about every Republican president since, well, Herbert Hoover. That’s because Democrats have been waiting for the resurrection of FDR like a cargo cult waiting for one last plane that never comes.

Such wishful thinking rarely pays off. History just doesn’t work like that. Lucy will always yank the football away from the Charlie Browns who think history will repeat itself perfectly. Fate, providence — whatever you want to call it — has a better sense of humor than that.

Which is why I’m beginning to think Barack Obama isn’t the next FDR — as so many promised — but the next Hoover.

The creation myth of the modern Democratic party goes something like this: After years of capitalist excess, exemplified by Hoover’s “market fundamentalism,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced reasonable and pragmatic reforms that not only conquered the Great Depression but “saved democracy” itself.

Over the last two years, Obama and his defenders have constantly invoked this story to buttress the case for Obama’s “new foundation” — his version of a new New Deal.

Whatever the problems with this story — and there are many — the simple fact is that history has happened. We live with the consequences of the New Deal. Its institutions — Social Security, the FDIC, etc. —are all around us, as are the progeny from the Great Society, another effort to replay the New Deal as if it were a new idea.

On liberals’ own terms, to argue that we need something like another New Deal or Great Society is to argue that these institutions either don’t exist or don’t work. But few, if any, liberals say anything like that. Instead, they change the subject. They talk about the Bush years as if they were a cross between a libertarian fantasy and an anarchist dystopia à la Mad Max.

Here’s Obama in his Cleveland speech Wednesday, describing the philosophy that defined the Bush years: “Cut taxes, especially for millionaires and billionaires. Cut regulations for special interests. Cut trade deals even if they didn’t benefit our workers. Cut back on investments in our people and our future — in education and clean energy, in research and technology. The idea was that if we had blind faith in the market, if we let corporations play by their own rules, if we left everyone else to fend for themselves, America would grow and prosper.”

What movie was he watching? At best this is a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robot battle between delusion and dishonesty. Rhetorically, Bush never advocated anything like any of this. Indeed, Bush the compassionate conservative described his philosophy thus: “When somebody hurts, government has got to move.” More concretely, under Bush we had massive spending increases on education, alternative energy, the National Institutes of Health, and health care. We saw the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, and the trade deals Bush pushed are now part of the Obama agenda.

But Obama needs to spout such hogwash in order to sell some very old “new” ideas.

It hasn’t worked. Americans understand this isn’t 1932 or 1964. Some even understand that many of our problems — housing? entitlements? — stem from the liberal accomplishments of the 1930s and 1960s. Professional liberals, however, remain in denial, insisting they suffer from a “communications” problem or some such nonsense.

At best, the Democrats bet badly on the business cycle. They expected the economy to recover quickly, as it usually does, and when it did they would credit their policies. That didn’t happen. The “new foundation” either has hurt the economy or did little to help it. Worse, from the liberal perspective, it further soured voters not just on Democrats but on faith in government generally, which Obama was supposed to restore.

And that’s the funny part. For reasons fair and unfair, the Great Depression discredited laissez-faire economics for a generation or more. Hoover, who was hardly the “market fundamentalist” FDR made him out to be, suffered largely from the (bad) luck of the draw, giving Democrats a chance to argue for a new deal of the cards. For reasons fair and unfair, Obama, who inherited a bad recession and made it worse, every day looks more like a modern-day Hoover, whining about his problems, rather than an FDR cheerily getting things done. Inadequate to the task, Obama is discrediting the statism he was elected to restore.

The punch line? When the economy finally rebounds, it might be just in time for Obama’s replacement to get all the credit.
Jonah Goldberg
NRO
 
Bush the compassionate conservative described his philosophy thus: “When somebody hurts, government has got to move.” More concretely, under Bush we had massive spending increases on education, alternative energy, the National Institutes of Health, and health care. We saw the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, and the trade deals Bush pushed are now part of the Obama agenda.



Never got the credit for his Democrat policies, just the blame for defending America.
__________________
How can you measure the value of knowing that company books are sounder than they were before? Of no more overnight bankruptcies with the employees and retirees left holding the bag? No more disruption to entire sectors of the economy?
Michael Oxley 2002
Co-Author of Sarbanes-Oxley Law

It will take the next economic crisis, as certainly it will come, to determine whether or not the provisions of this bill will actually provide this generation or the next generation of regulators with the tools necessary to minimize the effects of that crisis.
Chris Dodd
Co-Author Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act
 
It's U_D's MDR of doom and gloom...

From a biased, partisan hack site, my apologies...

The American Thinker
September 19, 2010

Wall Street’s Engines of Profit Are Slowing Down
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

Democrats Celebrate: We GOT those Evil Big Bankers and Wall Street where it hurts!

Inside the great investment houses on Wall Street, business has taken a surprising turn — downward.

[YEAH!!!!]

Even after taxpayer bailouts restored bankers’ profits and pay, the great Wall Street money machine is decelerating. Big financial institutions, including commercial banks, are still making a lot of money. But given unease in the financial markets and the economy, brokerages and investment banks are not making nearly as much as their executives, employees and investors had hoped.

After an unusually sharp slowdown in trading this summer, analysts are rethinking their profit forecasts for 2010.

The activities at the heart of what Wall Street does — selling and trading stocks and bonds, and advising on mergers — are running at levels well below where they were at this point last year, said Meredith Whitney, a bank analyst who was among the first to warn of the subprime mortgage disaster and its impact on big banks.

Worldwide, the number of stock offerings is down 15 percent from this time last year, while bond issuance is off 25 percent, according to Capital IQ, a research firm. Based on these trends, Ms. Whitney predicts that annual revenue from Wall Street’s main businesses will drop 25 percent, to around $42 billion in 2010, from $56 billion last year.


While the numbers will not be known until after the third quarter ends and financial companies begin reporting earnings in October, the pace of trading this summer was slow even by normal summer standards. Trading in shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange was down by 11 percent in July from 2009 levels, and August volume was off nearly 30 percent.

“What’s happened in the third quarter is that after a very slow summer, people expected things to come back,” said Ms. Whitney. “But they haven’t, and the inactivity is really squeezing everyone.”

The downward slide on Wall Street parallels a similar shift in the broader economy, which has slowed considerably since showing signs of a nascent recovery this spring. And if banks come under pressure, all but the safest borrowers may struggle to get loans.

With less than two weeks to go in the third quarter, companies will be hard-pressed to fulfill earlier, more optimistic expectations.

“It’s like the marathon: if you’re five miles behind, you can’t make that up in the last 10 minutes of the race,” said David H. Ellison, president of FBR Fund Advisers, a money management firm that specializes in financial companies. Many banks are barely scraping by in traditional Wall Street business.

As a result, executives, portfolio managers and analysts say that even the mighty Goldman Sachs, which posted a profit every day for the first three months of the year, is unlikely to deliver the kind of profit growth that investors have come to expect.

Keith Horowitz, a bank analyst at Citigroup, said he expected Goldman Sachs to earn $7.8 billion in 2010, a 35 percent decline from the $12.1 billion it made last year.

The drop in trading translates into lower commissions for brokerage firms, as well as a weaker environment for underwriting initial public offerings and other stock issues, traditionally a highly lucrative niche.

Banks are also scaling back on making bets with their own money — known as proprietary trading — another huge profit source in recent years that will soon be forbidden under terms of the financial reform legislation passed by Congress this summer.


[We showed THEM!!!]

Indeed, analysts have finally started to bring their forecasts in line with the new reality. On Sept. 12, Mr. Horowitz reduced his estimates for third-quarter profits at Goldman and Morgan Stanley.

Mr. Horowitz had predicted Goldman would make $1.75 billion in the third quarter, or $3 a share; he now expects Goldman’s profit to total $1.34 billion, or $2.30 a share. For Morgan Stanley, his revision was even steeper, with earnings expectations revised downward to $140 million, or 10 cents a share, from $726 million, or 53 cents a share.
Mr. Horowitz’s estimates are considerably lower than the consensus among analysts who track the two companies. If the other analysts revise their estimates closer to his, they would put pressure on the shares.

One of the rare bright spots for Wall Street recently has been the issuance of junk bonds, as ultra-low interest rates encourage investors to seek out riskier debt that carries a higher yield. But that will not be enough to offset the weakness elsewhere, said one top Wall Street executive who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly for his company, and because final numbers would not be tallied until the end of the month.

To make matters worse, he said, many Wall Street firms increased their work forces in the first half of the year, before the mood shifted and worries of a double-dip recession arose. If activity remains anemic, firms could soon begin cutting jobs again.

“I think the summer was horrible for everyone, and no one expected it to be as bad as it was,” he said. “It’s coming back a little bit in September but nowhere near enough to make up for what happened in July and August.”

The profit picture is brighter for diversified companies like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, which have larger commercial and retail banking operations in addition to their Wall Street units, but some analysts say earnings expectations for them could come down as well.
“Estimates still seem a little high, and the revenue story for all the banks is not a good one,” said Ed Najarian, who tracks the banking sector for ISI, a New York research firm.

With interest rates plunging, banks are making less off their interest-earning assets like government bonds and other ultra-safe securities. At the same time, demand for new loans remains weak. [GOOD NEWS! Obama has a spending bill that will cause small banks to JUMP at the opportunity to make loans!]

One wild card will be the credit card portfolios at major banks like JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citigroup. As delinquencies ease, Mr. Najarian said, credit losses are likely to decline. That trend helped earnings at JPMorgan in the second quarter, and could be crucial again in the third quarter.

Ms. Whitney says the gloomy short-term predictions foreshadow a series of lean years in the broader financial services industry.
Indeed, she said the Street faced a “resizing” not seen since the cutbacks that followed the bursting of the dot-com bubble a decade ago.

“We expect compensation to be down dramatically this year,” she wrote in a recent report. She predicts the American banking industry will lay off 40,000 to 80,000 employees, or as many as 1 in 10 of its workers.

That may be extreme, but Ms. Whitney argues that the boom years are not coming back anytime soon. As both consumers and companies cut back on debt, and financial reform rules put the brakes on profitable niches like derivatives and proprietary trading, the engines of earnings growth for the last decade will continue to sputter.



Reprints
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.
 
If you know how to use a computer and can rock a T-Shirt, here’s a job for you!


I Wear Your Shirt is looking for a few good men (or women) — to wear T-shirts for a living.

Jason Sadler — the guy who created his own job, mid-recession, wearing T-shirts for a living — is looking to hire four new professional T-Shirt wearers for 2011.

The business model behind IWearYourTShirt.com is simple: Companies pay Sadler to wear their T-Shirt and then talk about the company on Facebook, Twitter and in YouTube videos. [GOOG 496.4807 6.3307 (+1.29%) ]
“The biggest value isn’t in the amount of people who see the shirts — it’s the engagement,” Sadler explained. “It’s like, ‘Hey, guys, check this out!’”

So, that makes him, what, like the Kim Kardashian of T-shirts?

(Kardashian is said to get $10,000 per Tweet for endorsing products.)

“I’m a little bit sexier than Kim Kardashian!” Sadler quips.

It seemed like a bold move to start a business during a recession but Sadler may have hit the market with his idea at a perfect time: Companies have been slashing their marketing budgets but at the same time, increasing their social media presence.

Social media is expected to grow to 18 percent of companies' budgets within the next five years — that's three times as much as it is right now — according to a recent survey by Duke University and the American Marketing Association.

Sadler started his business in 2009, hired a second T-shirt wearer for 2010 and now he’s looking to hire four more for 2011.

To find his new hires for next year, Sadler took a page out of the “Best Job In the World” handbook and launched an online contest, where applicants submit a “YouTube video resume,” explaining why they'd be a great professional T-shirt wearer. But it doesn't stop there: They also have to demonstrate their social media prowess by getting their friends to comment on their video, rate it, etc.

Companies will pay anywhere from $5 to $1,825 per day to contract the fleet of T-shirt wearers to don their logos. It's a sliding scale, so it starts at $5 for Jan. 1 ($1 per person) and goes up $5 each day, so that's $10 for Jan. 2, $15 for Jan. 3, until Dec. 31, when it’s $1,825.

When he started the business with just himself, it was $1 for Jan. 1 and up incrementally until $365 on Dec. 31.

Sadler says the appeal of him and his T-Shirt fleet is that they offer a cheaper, easier alternative to hiring an in-house social-media consultant. Companies might pay $50,000 or more to hire a full-time person. Sadler says a company could hire IWearYourShirt for a tenth of the price and get half a month’s exposure in just a couple of days.

“That’s my pitch to people,” Sadler explains. “Stop paying a huge chunk of money to reinvent the wheel. We’ve got an engaged community ready to push out your message — we’ve got fans, followers and people viewing.”

The model is attractive to small businesses like Good Life Granola, a small granola maker in Michigan, and a guy who invented an iPod holder called the Pod Flex Pro, though Sadler also gets some larger clients like Pizza Hut [YUM 45.97 0.22 (+0.48%) ] and Nissan [NSANY 16.65 0.09 (+0.54%) ].

The starting salary for a professional T-shirt wearer is $35,000 but Sadler says there will be bonuses “for awesomeness.”

Plus, there are added perks like free jeans, underwear and socks.

Sadler and his second shirt, Evan White, had all three of those items sponsored this year: They got a supply of Lucky Jeans [LIZ 5.48 -0.01 (-0.18%) ], underwear from Jockey and socks from Blacksocks.com. He’s hoping for more sponsorships next year.

Oh, and Sadler has promised to buy every new hire a new Macbook Pro laptop [AAPL 277.41 2.04 (+0.74%) ], a digital camera and a video camera.

If you think you’ve got what it takes to walk the walk and wear the shirt, you can apply at http://www.iwearyourshirt.com/hiring.

DeAndre Upshaw was named earlier this week as the first of the 2011 shirts — three more will be named between now and Dec. 15.
 
Christ. The country that built the Saturn Five and the 747, reduced to tee shirts.

There are lots of ways to make money if you have a knack for thinking outside the box.

Here's an anacdote:

I went to high school with a guy who was smart as a whip (almost as smart as me). He got a fancy degree from Stanford in something useless (Philosophy, I think), then went on to Harvard Law School.

He clerked for some famous judge (I forget which one, and it's unimportant to the story), then got a high-paying job with a huge DC Law Factory. Eventually he made partner and was pulling down about $600k per year (in the 90s when $600k was real money).

Anywho - he got tired of the 18 hour days and decided to quit. Just chucked it all and took a couple of years to "find himself." Grew his hair long and everything.

Eventually he got bored and decided to buy one of those vending carts. He set up shop outside the doors of his old firm on 19th and Penn Ave in DC selling burritos. He had bean, meat or bean with meat. $5 a pop.

Within a month he had a line waiting for his burritos. It took him about 30 seconds to make a burrito, and pocketed a $5 bill. He now owns dozens of carts and has other people making the burritos.

I don't know what he makes, but I bet it's more than he would be making if he stayed with the law gig.
 
There are lots of ways to make money if you have a knack for thinking outside the box.

Here's an anacdote:

I went to high school with a guy who was smart as a whip (almost as smart as me). He got a fancy degree from Stanford in something useless (Philosophy, I think), then went on to Harvard Law School.

He clerked for some famous judge (I forget which one, and it's unimportant to the story), then got a high-paying job with a huge DC Law Factory. Eventually he made partner and was pulling down about $600k per year (in the 90s when $600k was real money).

Anywho - he got tired of the 18 hour days and decided to quit. Just chucked it all and took a couple of years to "find himself." Grew his hair long and everything.

Eventually he got bored and decided to buy one of those vending carts. He set up shop outside the doors of his old firm on 19th and Penn Ave in DC selling burritos. He had bean, meat or bean with meat. $5 a pop.

Within a month he had a line waiting for his burritos. It took him about 30 seconds to make a burrito, and pocketed a $5 bill. He now owns dozens of carts and has other people making the burritos.

I don't know what he makes, but I bet it's more than he would be making if he stayed with the law gig.

Methane
 
I don't know what he makes, but I bet it's more than he would be making if he stayed with the law gig.

I seriously doubt that. If he has multiple carts around the city, and selling food like crazy, my guess is he is making very good money, but not in the $600k range. But I'm willing to bet you he is working just as hard as he did when he was a lawyer. You have to take into acount that you can't sell food all day, every single day (rain, winter and all that). Plus there are overhead costs like labo r and leasing, food, permits, etc. Plus, you need that good location!!!

It's a great story nonetheless and it just shows you that if you lose your job, go get a food truck or the like. Life has endless possibilities.
 
I seriously doubt that. If he has multiple carts around the city, and selling food like crazy, my guess is he is making very good money, but not in the $600k range. But I'm willing to bet you he is working just as hard as he did when he was a lawyer. You have to take into acount that you can't sell food all day, every single day (rain, winter and all that). Plus there are overhead costs like labo r and leasing, food, permits, etc. Plus, you need that good location!!!

It's a great story nonetheless and it just shows you that if you lose your job, go get a food truck or the like. Life has endless possibilities.

I don't know the economics of the business, but assuming he has minimum wage workers preparing the carts in the morning, with one per cart selling from 11am to 2 pm, and 10 carts spread out in the central business district:

30 seconds per burrito - 2 per minute

2 per minute = 120 per hour X 3 hours = 360 per cart per day.

360 X $5 = $1,800 per day X 10 carts = $18,000 per day

$18,000 per day X 260 work days = $4,680,000 gross.


Labor costs of about $10 per hour X 10 workers for 8 hours per day = $800 per day, or $208,000 per year.

Cost of beans and meat, I don't know.

Cost of kitchen facilites and carts, I don't know.

But still, he's doing ok.
 
I don't know the economics of the business, but assuming he has minimum wage workers preparing the carts in the morning, with one per cart selling from 11am to 2 pm, and 10 carts spread out in the central business district:

30 seconds per burrito - 2 per minute

2 per minute = 120 per hour X 3 hours = 360 per cart per day.

360 X $5 = $1,800 per day X 10 carts = $18,000 per day

$18,000 per day X 260 work days = $4,680,000 gross.


Labor costs of about $10 per hour X 10 workers for 8 hours per day = $800 per day, or $208,000 per year.

Cost of beans and meat, I don't know.

Cost of kitchen facilites and carts, I don't know.

But still, he's doing ok.

If he's really grossing 4.6 mil then he's probably netting around 2.5 to 3 or so. Give or take a few hundred K. Not bad if you can pull it off but it's not that much different than a restaurant and those are notoriously hard to profit from.
 
If he's really grossing 4.6 mil then he's probably netting around 2.5 to 3 or so. Give or take a few hundred K. Not bad if you can pull it off but it's not that much different than a restaurant and those are notoriously hard to profit from.

Plus, the competition from the wiener carts is stiff.
 
If he's really grossing 4.6 mil then he's probably netting around 2.5 to 3 or so. Give or take a few hundred K. Not bad if you can pull it off but it's not that much different than a restaurant and those are notoriously hard to profit from.

You're assuming a fifty percent profit margin, something that's harder to find than a moderate on lit.

His margin is probably closer to 25% or even 10%. If he does a lot of the work himself he probably gives himself a paycheck. In that case his dollars per year would go up but the margin is unaffected.

On the other hand, maybe such margins are possible in food.
 
Not bad if you can pull it off but it's not that much different than a restaurant and those are notoriously hard to profit from.

Mainly because of the bricks and mortar costs, which have to be extremely high in a city like Washington DC.
 
He probably pointed out how Cuba managed to come up with a health care system that serves all its citizens, not just 80% of the country.

...and thank God in cuba no one has the right to become a millionaire

we must adopt that in America
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top