Productivity by the American worker has had massive gains in recent years, yet incomes have not kept pace with inflation. More and more American workers do not even receive healthcare from their employers, instead burdening taxpayer funded government insurance plans.
Jobs have been offshored, this is old-hat, to finance an increase in the middle classes (or creation of) in places like China and India.
Where have the benefits of these reduced labor costs gone? Have median incomes in the USA gone up? No. Have shareholders been reaping the benefits of the cost savings through increased returns, ie Dividends? No.
Billions have been lost through the subprime debacle, and although the blame could be fairly widely spread on this - CEOs walk away with million dollar parachutes for running their companies into the ground. Who cares if you're taking on bad loans like a ship taking on water, if you have a golden yacht alongside waiting for you to depart?
Companies do not pay dividends anymore. Finally, after carnage in the stock market lately, dividend rates are up from the jokes they had been 1-3% (not outpacing inflation).
Governments and businesses are top-heavy, the American worker does the real work and will likely be shouldering the burden of cuts and lay-offs to come due to the economy.
Employees and investors are too busy pulling off incredible feats of productivity to call management on the carpet. To go to their union and complain about wages, to complain to management about the dividend policies. The time has come. The managerial revolution is over.
The American citizen should have been turned into a business owner of sorts during the offshoring of jobs (opportunities). Companies that offshored jobs should have faced taxes and/or tarrifs for so doing, and these should have been passed along to US citizens. Not as welfare, a government handout, but as a reward for making a good deal on unit labor costs. Work sucks - I'd rather be a business owner than an employee anyway.
What about employee owned companies? Eliminate management altogether. There would be an incentive to run things properly as everyone would have a stake in the success of operations.
If you don't work then you don't eat is what I say. The American worker works harder and better than any labor force in the world, and guess what? We're hungry.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Thinking for yourself
I really respect the type of knowledge that results from an intelligent person looking at the world around them, drawing from their reservoir of experiences and learning and coming to their own conclusions vs "going with the flow."
Culture comes with presuppositions, the languages we speak condition our thought. We slowly begin to be molded into a society, losing our ability to think for ourselves. We hardly know that there is anything missing. Until the electricity doesn't work, or our car breaks down, and we realize what boobs we've been for not having a flashlight, or a tire iron, cellphone, or 25 cents or whatever.
That's why I respect the hard-fought knowledge of folks like Howard Ruff. He has a new updated version of his classic from the 70s - How to Survive and Prosper in the Coming Bad Years. Folks like Ruff will prosper - because they do their own analysis. If you base your decisions off of CNBC you're screwed - you are the "Sheeple."
Same thing applies to any subject. The modern, cognitive-behavioral psychologies treat people like stimulus-response animals. Very pragmatic, but a poor excuse for a philosophy of man. Concepts like "empathy" are virtual trash to me, instead I prefer the insights of Heidegger and Medard Boss. Once again, we are not ghosts in the machine of a body. We do not need science to tell us that we communicate with others, that we use empathy.
Culture comes with presuppositions, the languages we speak condition our thought. We slowly begin to be molded into a society, losing our ability to think for ourselves. We hardly know that there is anything missing. Until the electricity doesn't work, or our car breaks down, and we realize what boobs we've been for not having a flashlight, or a tire iron, cellphone, or 25 cents or whatever.
That's why I respect the hard-fought knowledge of folks like Howard Ruff. He has a new updated version of his classic from the 70s - How to Survive and Prosper in the Coming Bad Years. Folks like Ruff will prosper - because they do their own analysis. If you base your decisions off of CNBC you're screwed - you are the "Sheeple."
Same thing applies to any subject. The modern, cognitive-behavioral psychologies treat people like stimulus-response animals. Very pragmatic, but a poor excuse for a philosophy of man. Concepts like "empathy" are virtual trash to me, instead I prefer the insights of Heidegger and Medard Boss. Once again, we are not ghosts in the machine of a body. We do not need science to tell us that we communicate with others, that we use empathy.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Single family homes and Profiteering
I know one of the things that makes capitalism work, market economies, in the Grand old land of opportunity is the profit motive.
I am ok with people speculating, flipping, and causing chaos in downtown markets, in areas like Hawaii, San Diego, NYC etc. I draw the line with profiteering single family homes in the suburbs, where the thankless workers who fuel the whole system of wealth for others, are forced to reside in the few hours they have away from the ball and chain they call their job.
In the most recent article in Barrons, an article gets into detail about the workings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, well, how they used to work anyway, before the US government took them over in conservatorship.
Well, apparently in an effort to realize huge gains for shareholders, and increase their market share, they took on a lot of crappy paper that they shouldn't have. This means loans that wouldn't be paid back.
Fannie and Freddie buy mortgages to take them off the banks books so they can make new loans, and sold some of them away as securities - apparently guaranteeing them against default at least part of the time.
The article makes an interesting comparison. Utility companies are regulated, and I happen to know, from reading Security Analysis by the father of value investing, Benjamin Graham, that the oversight (ie Corporation Commission) sets limits on rate increases, and generally limits the companies/investor return to what is deemed reasonable - typically around 6% return on investment.
Why should scalpers be let loose in residential real estate, in the suburbs, to inflate home values to 2-3-4 times what median incomes can support? Why should our State, City governments depend upon nothing but the continual increase of housing values and employment from housing related acitivities for income?
This country needs Economic leadership - we need a national vision - we need to have a common goal. I think it could be something like a united effort to lead the way in curing diseases and alleviating human suffering. Something, for God's sake, more meaningfull than ever-expanding suburbs, with ever increasing values (not really), needing cheap, exploitable immigrant labor (funny how the immigrant labor managed to swarm in when it was needed, even in this post 9/11 world - can you say border security?)
Stop playing roulette with housing, you political jerks. Get a vision.
I am ok with people speculating, flipping, and causing chaos in downtown markets, in areas like Hawaii, San Diego, NYC etc. I draw the line with profiteering single family homes in the suburbs, where the thankless workers who fuel the whole system of wealth for others, are forced to reside in the few hours they have away from the ball and chain they call their job.
In the most recent article in Barrons, an article gets into detail about the workings of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, well, how they used to work anyway, before the US government took them over in conservatorship.
Well, apparently in an effort to realize huge gains for shareholders, and increase their market share, they took on a lot of crappy paper that they shouldn't have. This means loans that wouldn't be paid back.
Fannie and Freddie buy mortgages to take them off the banks books so they can make new loans, and sold some of them away as securities - apparently guaranteeing them against default at least part of the time.
The article makes an interesting comparison. Utility companies are regulated, and I happen to know, from reading Security Analysis by the father of value investing, Benjamin Graham, that the oversight (ie Corporation Commission) sets limits on rate increases, and generally limits the companies/investor return to what is deemed reasonable - typically around 6% return on investment.
Why should scalpers be let loose in residential real estate, in the suburbs, to inflate home values to 2-3-4 times what median incomes can support? Why should our State, City governments depend upon nothing but the continual increase of housing values and employment from housing related acitivities for income?
This country needs Economic leadership - we need a national vision - we need to have a common goal. I think it could be something like a united effort to lead the way in curing diseases and alleviating human suffering. Something, for God's sake, more meaningfull than ever-expanding suburbs, with ever increasing values (not really), needing cheap, exploitable immigrant labor (funny how the immigrant labor managed to swarm in when it was needed, even in this post 9/11 world - can you say border security?)
Stop playing roulette with housing, you political jerks. Get a vision.
Sunday, September 07, 2008
The Housing Bubble
Reviewing some real estate listings recently, I was surprised at just how many were short sale or lender owned properties. Then again, I usually had a hunch that they were when looking through the pictures you see pictures of a fully-furnished home, often with little chairs, toys and obvious miscellania showing that young children live(d) there.
We are a country of hard workers, there can be no doubt about that. The American work ethic is legendary. Most of us don't want handouts, we work for what we get.
When the stock market went crazy back in 2000 and then finally collapsed, some investors lost money. When Greenspan and the US government brought interest rates down near zero and spurred the housing bubble to inflate, they planted the seed for much chaos and suffering down the road.
Without so much as even giving an eye to the consequences, for who among us did not realize that prices were way out of hand? Does anyone actually smoke enough dope to think that prices can be maintained at a level 2-3 times more than average monthly incomes? Guess what, when the rate resets from the teaser rate, people get screwed every time.
The list goes on and on. Stated income loans.
What has been allowed to happen - the huge rise and fall in housing prices, has dealt a serious blow to many American households. As far as I know, there has been no scrambling efforts by the government to take care of the citizens who have been disenfranchised by this debacle. The scrambling efforts to save companies, Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, continues.
The sheer stupidity, I mean, to even think that the US government and regulators did not see this coming...well that sheer stupidity has caused some people to think the government has let this happen on purpose for some secret reason.
My point is, they have fouled the American Dream, have dealt an unwelcome blow, a slap in the face to the middle class. People who do nothing but go to work every day and try to scratch out a living and a better life for themselves and their children. Now they're taking away their homes. Disrupting lives. Causing divorces, suicides, murders, abuse, mental breakdowns.
We are a country of hard workers, there can be no doubt about that. The American work ethic is legendary. Most of us don't want handouts, we work for what we get.
When the stock market went crazy back in 2000 and then finally collapsed, some investors lost money. When Greenspan and the US government brought interest rates down near zero and spurred the housing bubble to inflate, they planted the seed for much chaos and suffering down the road.
Without so much as even giving an eye to the consequences, for who among us did not realize that prices were way out of hand? Does anyone actually smoke enough dope to think that prices can be maintained at a level 2-3 times more than average monthly incomes? Guess what, when the rate resets from the teaser rate, people get screwed every time.
The list goes on and on. Stated income loans.
What has been allowed to happen - the huge rise and fall in housing prices, has dealt a serious blow to many American households. As far as I know, there has been no scrambling efforts by the government to take care of the citizens who have been disenfranchised by this debacle. The scrambling efforts to save companies, Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, continues.
The sheer stupidity, I mean, to even think that the US government and regulators did not see this coming...well that sheer stupidity has caused some people to think the government has let this happen on purpose for some secret reason.
My point is, they have fouled the American Dream, have dealt an unwelcome blow, a slap in the face to the middle class. People who do nothing but go to work every day and try to scratch out a living and a better life for themselves and their children. Now they're taking away their homes. Disrupting lives. Causing divorces, suicides, murders, abuse, mental breakdowns.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Blame my silence on Windows XP
Had a major screw up with my computer - spent probably 16 hours this weekend between re-installing everything, running Virus scan and spyware searches (found nothing).
I've done a complete overhaul and even upgraded my memory and installed backups. I have the feeling there are some nasty malware circulating, probably exploiting Windows vulnerabilities. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm not the only one having a computer meltdown.
One way to look at it: It certainly forces one to spend some money at the old computer store doesn't it?
Makes you think...maybe Norton and McAfee create viruses, maybe new startup spyware programs create terrible spyware. Maybe someone crashes Windows so you'll buy Apple.
I've done a complete overhaul and even upgraded my memory and installed backups. I have the feeling there are some nasty malware circulating, probably exploiting Windows vulnerabilities. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm not the only one having a computer meltdown.
One way to look at it: It certainly forces one to spend some money at the old computer store doesn't it?
Makes you think...maybe Norton and McAfee create viruses, maybe new startup spyware programs create terrible spyware. Maybe someone crashes Windows so you'll buy Apple.
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