What They Deserve

The Hill article, "AIG staff: We deserve this money," quoted a source saying,
"“Quants,” the people who put together the computer-programmed algorithms behind the complicated hedges and trades that brought down the company, pushed back hard against any notion they should sacrifice their bonuses"

These people who have made enough money never to work again, do not deserve anything. They may want those bonuses, but they surely do not deserve them and certainly did not earn them. The whole notion of being deserving or feeling entitled has gotten us in this mess in the first place. Feeling entitled or deserving leads to a dangerous hubris that gives us permission to make bad deals, loans, trades that put our economy in peril. They had emerged from biz school believing the hype about themselves as golden children who were the brains behind wealth generation, when it is really the fact that it was the everyday worker who creates and buys real products and services that run an economy.

These Quants and their ilk kill jobs, wreck local economies, drain public coffers, and then try to tell us how indespensible they are in fixing the mess so we should pay them millions to stay on.

The MBAs who only bring companies their complex schemes to skim wealth via bonuses for the short term leaving the company weak or non-existent in the long term have nothing to offer our economy but ruin. They are the ones who layoff workers, lose money for shareholders, and basically mismanage the company without a notion of consequences because they know that they will always get a golden parachute. Bonuses used to be used to reward behavior that made the company stronger. Bonuses were for when a company was doing well and was a gesture to recognize the employee's contribution toward that end.

All the economic failures that have come to pass were very, very predictable and was predicted long before it happened but was drowned out by the mainstream media, Wall Street, and all the "experts" in bed with this broken system. If they had any sense at all everyone who brought this about knew very well this economic collapse would happen, but didn't care because they knew they would emerge from the dust wealthy. They do not care about our country nor do they understand our sacrifice as tax payers in bailing them out.

I want names released of these people who feel that in the face of their overwhelming failure that they deserve anything. What they do deserve and completely earn is a public shaming as crooked failures. They failed and continue to fail our country. They are not golden children who create wealth but drain it. The Quants and those like them need to be publically paraded in dunce caps and sandwich signs with their economic sins scrawled on them and which they would have to recite before angry crowds. They deserve to be poster children for the failure of all the crap that has been taught in business schools the past twenty years or so.

Our culture needs to stop worshipping unrestrained capitalists who transfer wealth upwards, leaving the rest of us to pick up the tab for their adventures.

As 80% owner of AIG I believe that these people owe AIG all of their bonuses, and if they are allowed to work to fix the problem they do so working off all the ill-got funds they recieved. If not, there are plenty of intelligent and hardworking people who have lost their jobs because of these people who can step in and fix it.

C-Notes, Euros, and Liberty Dollars!

Back in the Summer of 84, life was wonderful traveling Europe with a strong dollar. WTF happened? You have serious whack-job goofballs printing their own inflation-proof currency. The rest of the world is wondering if the world belongs to European currency. Even rap stars are dissing our once illustrious currency.

C-Notes and P-Notes: Wonkette reports that a group of Ron Paul supporters were raided because they were creating illegal currency, Liberty Dollars, featuring Paul. How are liberty dollars any different than Camel Cash? Save up enough liberty dollars and you can get Ron Paul lighters, shot glasses, ash trays, and a Ron Paul Members Only Jacket.

When surfing the net about camel cash, there was an old article from Bob from Accounting that our Dollar has been collapsing against the old C-note. A fact noted in an April 1997 Onion issue.

Show me the Euros: Jay-Z in his video, Blue Magic, flashes Euros as the new bling-bling bankroll. The International Herald Tribune reports:
"Shortly after Angola and Iraq announced they may consider shifting their currency reserves away from the dollar and into the euro and other currencies, Nigeria's Finance Minister Shamsuddeen Usman said he was considering the same thing."

In related news, there was an OPEC oops today. OPEC accidentally broadcast Saudi Arabia rebuffing efforts of Iran and Venezuela to price oil in other currencies other than the US dollar. Saudi Arabia rejected the proposal because it didn't want to collapse the Dollar. It turns out that some oil producing countries will de-peg and diversify away from the US Dollar.

Strong Economy? Not!

Yesterday, the Dow has plunged 362 points just a day after the Fed lowered interest rates. The Dow is trying to recover today based on Job numbers. The economy added 166,000 jobs in October, the fastest pace in five months. Good news, right? Whenever I hear news like this, I ask the crucial question: What Kind of Jobs? I always want to see the numbers behind the headlines.
From Shaffers Research:

- of 278 industries, 53.4% were adding jobs in October, down slightly from 55.6% in September
- Of 84 manufacturing industries, 43.5% were hiring in October, which is the strongest figure since July.
- Jobs in goods-producing industries fell by 24,000.
- jobs were also lost at banks and mortgage brokers, where employment fell by 5,000 in October, bringing the cumulative loss to 56,000 since February
- the services industry saw strong jobs growth, where employment rose by 190,000, the most since May
- Food services added 37,000 positions
- health care added 34,000
- employment services added 34,000

So it appears that job growth is fueled by the healthcare industry that has become a drain on the pocketbooks of the average american and small businesses because no one wants to control health care costs. We have created jobs in the field of finding jobs, which is kind of messed up if you think about it. Finally, we have created burger-flipping jobs! Is this really good news? I hardly doubt any of these jobs can keep up with the real inflation in this country.

We are also told that inflation is holding steady. How could that be when costs for food, fuel, and health care are rising beyond our incomes? What do you know, Core inflation figures exclude volatile food and energy prices. The Christan Science Monitor reports that "overall inflation, as measured by the personal consumption expenditures deflator, is up 2.4 percent for the year, above the Fed’s so-called comfort zone of 1 percent to 2 percent. That rise, compared with 1.8 percent in August, most likely reflected the surging cost of crude oil, which pushes up gasoline and energy prices."

There are signs that inflation is really higher given the rise in the cost of fuel, food, health care combined with the declining value of the dollar, which effects our buying power. Another thing to keep in mind is that the cost of renting or buying a home due to the bubble and its aftermath, bites into the American wallet. The financial picture is excellent if you factor out all the basic necessities of living for the average american. Don't forget to factor in the rising costs of child care, education, and services and products.

We are also told that personal spending is still holding up, which is good news since personal spending, which accounts for two-thirds of the gross domestic product.
How long will Americans be able to keep spending? If you take a look at the New York Housing Bubble Blog, they have some very interesting news items including Bloomberg's report that US Home foreclosures Doubled in the 3rd Quarter of 2007 and that Realtytrac Inc reports there were 635,159 forclosure filings in the 3q or 1 in 196 households including default notices, auction notices,and bank repossessions.

Who is going to want to go Christmas shopping when they have just lost their home?

Keep in mind that we are at the beginning of the fallout of the real estate bubble.
Mortgage resets for the notorius subprime loans will end up spiking in the latter half of
2008. Then in 2010 and 2011, we will start seeing resets on option adjustable rate loans and Alt-A loans (or "Liars Loans"). Unless these people can refinance in fixed loans with monthly payments they can actually afford, a lot of people will lose their homes and there will be tough times ahead for all of us.

One of my favorite bloggers is Marinite from the Marin Real Estate Bubble website. He writes that the American people are being lied to when it comes to the economy. He quotes Peter Schiff's November 1st editorial about how bogus all these financial numbers are that are bolstering the belief that our economy is strong, when the average joe feels something is wrong. I have actually heard someone on CNBC boggle at that disconnect between what the "experts" are telling us and the reality Americans experience.

We have all heard about the decline of the Dollar and how good it is for our exports.
The US Dollar Index has declined from 92 to 78 in less than two years - a 15% depreciation
in value. This effects American buying power not just when they travel abroad, but what we
purchase in this country.

Interest rate cuts only make the situation worse. Rate cuts may make it easier to borrow
and provide relief for those who have already borrowed (especially those attached to Adjustible Rate Mortgages) but it punishes people who save and invest in safe investments and reduces overall purchasing power.

If one steps back, we can begin to realize that our consumer economy is broken. What buttresses our economy is the consumer's ability to spend. The consumer's ability to spend has a lot to do with their ability to borrow to buy beyond what they have on hand. Can you imagine our economy if people gave up their credit cards and didn't buy anything until they saved up for it? Where would our economy be if people scrimped and saved or just realized one day that the consumer appetite was unsustainable? Jobs would be lost and our economic system could collapse.

The People You Meet in Heaven, Hell, and the Purgatory of Poor Fools

The Hell: Paving the Road to Hell by Convincing US it is going to Heaven

Red Rove'r, Red Rove'r send insane evil right over! Somewhere in Texas an arch-demon, MC Rove, re-enters his demon-cave from whence he spawned. I wish I could report that our long national nightmare is over now that this creature has retreated into his fiery liar with his "family" or demon-kin of fear-sprites, bible-twisting fire-imps, and oozing oil sludges.

We are still fighting this impossible war, which "Manchurian Candidate" McCain insists we are winning, when everyone agrees that a political solution rather than military might is far from being accomplished. There are no guarantees that we can prevent full blown calamity regardless if we stay or go. People will continue to die and be maimed with or without our assistance.

Then we have the economy that has been lauded as Bush's creation that is going downhill due to overly-permissive lending practices that will have far reaching consequences for all of us. People who were lead to believe that they could afford their no-interest or adjustable loans because the value of homes would continue to go up are going to lose their homes. The day-traders of the nineties turned into real estate flippers of the aughts have returned to the stock market creating the false illusion that the stock market can only go up. Due to recent volatile dips in the stock market, people will simply not know where to invest if they have any money left to invest. If people have trouble getting loans or refinancing they will be unable to afford to remodel their homes, effecting all the contractors: plumbers, electricians, furniture, landscapers, appliance makers, masons, home builders, and all the service providers that were making the economy seem to hum. Due to home values declining there is less incentive to make improvements even if the money is there, because there is no guarantee that you will get that money back on the resell of the home.

Oh...and we can also talk about our indebtedness to China, that seems to want to poison our kids with lead paint and pets with bad pet food. In fairness we cannot lay that on the laps of the pantheon of demon-kin that is the Bush Whitehouse alone. We can blame them though for our spiraling debt.


The Heaven: Coffee and Art

In the past days, I have been able to compare side by side Peets Coffee against Henry's House of Coffee, and we have discovered that hands down -- Henry makes better coffee. We have one of those Krup Carafe coffeemakers and often we reheat what is left over from the day before in the morning. Peets coffee turns rancid tasting if left over night, but Henry's tastes like it did when it was first brewed. I am telling you that with the free shipping Henry offers, there is no reason why you shouldn't be drinking his coffee. Walk in his San Francisco shop while he is roasting his beans and it is surely what heaven must smell like. You will be dizzy with pleasure. I promise.

Stop right now and dial: 1.800.578.5282 and order his coffee. I prefer his 1/2 french roast and 1/2 mocha java blend and Henry's Blend Decaf. He has a wide variety of beans. Do it. Do it. Do it.

I came across a wonderful art blog called dear ada, there are countless wonderful finds from the art world. It is my heaven when i want a fresh dose of art to discover.

Purgatory of Poor Fools: Pig Biting Madness In Print No More

I remember in my sophomore year in high school, my friends and I took a train to San Francisco from Menlo Park and we bought a Weekly World News. We were astonished by various tales of genetic mishaps of Batboy and Ed Anger telling us that he would would join the troops in Lebanon if it weren't for the fact that he had a steel plate in his skull.

The Weekly World News has recently announced that they will be going web only and ceasing to kill trees to bring us news of pending Armageddon or new mutant babies.

While I like saving trees for real news, I somehow feel like it is an end of an era of buying this rag and using it for wrapping paper for kitchy gift giving.

This paper lives in a space between heaven and hell. It is uniquely American, haven for Photoshop hacks, and provides empty calories of useless, false information (which FoxNews takes to a high art). I will miss the appropriately seedy and tactile experience of having the newsprint bleed on your fingers -- something a website just can't do.