Tag Archives: economy

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Bossing. I don’t like being a supervisor – even when it’s only a temporary expedient. I didn’t like it when I was one and I don’t like it when I get to pretend to be one now. I like it even less when top cover is nowhere to be found. And while I don’t like it, don;t think for a minute that I’ll shy away from making decisions. They might not always (or even often) be the right one, but we won’t flail around blindly in the name of indecision. Mercifully nothing I touch is life or death so the consequences of straying outside some unknown left or right boundary marker are pretty minimal. I suppose they could always throw the job to someone – anyone – who might be more interested or more qualified, but that’s most likely wishful thinking on my part.

2. Email. If you send me an email there’s a better than average chance that it arrived. You don’t need to call me 15 seconds after hitting send to ask if I got it and then ask me to opine on the topic of your inquiry. The fact is, I wasn’t sitting at my desk staring blankly waiting for your email. I know some people are a bit ADD about checking their email as it arrives. I’m not. I’ll work in whatever issue you have after I’ve reached a suitable stopping point with whatever it is I was working on while your message was winging its way across the network. Even then, sadly, you may not be the most important thing in my inbox. Priority of effort goes (not necessarily in order) to the boss, the uber-boss, echelons higher than the uber-boss, and then, lastly, everyone else. It’s not personal, but I feel like tending to people who have some authority over my yearly performance appraisal first is a pretty good system. Believe me, I will get to your message, even if I don’t consider it as much of a crisis as you do.

3. Millennials who bitch about the stock market. If you have 20, 30, or more years before you plan to retire, a down market is the very least of your worries. In fact, it’s kind of a gift. You’re getting the opportunity to by your shares at crazy deep discount price compared to what you would have paid a year ago. It must be hard to believe, but more shares bought cheap compounded out over the next 30 years is in all likelihood a thing of financial beauty. Sure, it looks like you’re taking a beating on paper right now, but you’re supposed to be playing the long game here. No one loses actual money until the cash out their chips and make the loss “real.” That’s not you, kids. Let your parents bitch about that down market because they’re the ones who are getting taken to the woodshed if they planned on retiring any time soon. For you, my millennial friends, this whole thing could shape up to be a once in a decade or once in a generation buying opportunity, so play your hands accordingly.

Tinfoil hat society…

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Let’s take a minute and look at the headlines tonight: Ebola is loose in the United States for the first time in recorded history, they’re protesting for democratic reforms in China, Europe’s economy appears to be at stall speed, and it wouldn’t take much more than a stiff wind to push ours in the same direction, the Secret Service is letting armed felons within arms reach of a sitting president. In general, civilization seems to be beset and besotted at every turn.

300px-Tin_foil_hat_2I’ve never been a dues-paying member of the Tinfoil Hat Society, but I do think the world we live in bears a closer look. Two things immediately jump to mind: 1) It doesn’t matter if it’s the local station, the cable networks or the internet, bad news makes people want to look and generates revenue from advertising sales; 2) Most of the asshattery I see in the world more or less confirms my preconceived notions about people as a group; and 3) Just by virtue of the law of large numbers, even paranoid people have to be right occasionally.

I could probably get a thousand new views a day if I gave this site over to ranting and raving about global conspiracies. The fact is, after having spent my adult life in public service I have my doubts about any organization being able to pull together a grand scheme to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids. More importantly, I throughly doubt their ability to do it in anything approaching secrecy. I mean I’m not allowed to build a 10 slide PowerPoint briefing without soliciting input from at least 14 other people, so you can understand how I might doubt the ability of an unknown global organization to rig the economy, unleashing a pandemic, and engineer a catastrophic war between East and West in complete secrecy.

I tend to think the long laundry list of things that go wrong are attributable to not much more than our collective bad decision making catching up with us. It feels like a simpler and more rational explanation than a transcontinental conspiracy bent on controlling everything everywhere. I’m pretty sure I’m right about that.

Then again, my assumption of being right won’t keep me from picking up a box of latex gloves, a few bottles of alcohol, and some surgical masks. Just in case.

Two days…

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I’m back at work. Have been since last week. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped paying attention to the grand game of “How Many Asshats can We Fit in One Building?” that our political “leaders” are playing on the Hill. As bad as it is that Republicans and Democrats seem physiological incapable of talking to one another, that’s nothing compared to the truly remarkable feat of House Republicans apparently not even being able to talk amongst themselves. That takes political incompetence to a whole new level. Impressive work, Congressmen.

From my reading of the tea leaves, we’re inside the 48 hour mark now. Either these jackasses will get around to doing the hard work of governing or they’ll crank the throttle wide open and let it all fly off the rails. I’m a reasonable close watcher of politics and a betting man by nature, but even if I wasn’t owed back pay and had a fist full of cash, I wouldn’t lay a bet on which way this shitshow is going to break.

Universal wisdom is that careening headlong into the debt ceiling would be bad. The fun part? Absolutely no one knows how bad it might be. My reading pegs it somewhere along the scale of Accidental Nuclear Detonation in Times Square Bad. Even if it’s less bad than that, it’s going to be bad. Defaulting on the sovereign debt and/or other financial obligations of the United States is simply unimaginable from any sane, reasonable perspective. To do it over an issue of personal pride or to make cheap political points is damned near treasonous.

We have 536 “leaders” in Washington and there’s apparently not one damned statesman in the bunch.

Skipped out…

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So yeah, I skipped yesterday. It doesn’t happen very often and while I make no apologies for taking a day off now and then, I like to think I’m delivering you some great old posts this morning by way of making up for being a lazy sod yesterday.

This week’s archive posts include one of my favorite rants – one about economics, freeloaders, and expectations. You might be able to imagine that it’s a topic about which I feel rather passionate. The good news is that while so much of the world has changed since May 2008, my own opinions have remained remarkably stable. There’s just something to be said about consistency over time.

The other four posts are entertaining in their own right, of course, but the rant on May 6th is the one you’re going to want to read if you don’t have time to look them all over this Sunday morning. So go forth, enjoy, and be back tomorrow evening when we once again go live with fresh material and I do my part to be a voice of sanity in a world gone mad.

The abyss…

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With 24 days left for POTUS and the collective membership United States Congress to start acting like statesmen instead of maladjusted teenagers, it seems like as good a time as any to ponder what falling off the edge of the fiscal cliff might actually look like. Spending would continue to increase more or less unchecked. Taxes would increase across the board. The national credit rating would plummet. The defense budget would get gutted right along with a host of domestic programs that up until now were considered too important to do without. Those are some of the big ticket, first order effects. I’m not sure I even want to speculate about what the 3rd and 4th order effects would entail. I’m not confident that any economist in the country legitimately knows what the end result of fiscal cliff diving would be. Most seem to agree, though, that it would result in a situation that is less than good.

Thoughtful people can honestly disagree about good policy and the right course of action, but intuitively I can’t believe that higher taxes are the solution. Because I’m OCD about certain things, I have a spreadsheet that keeps track of my income, taxes, and other deductions going back a decade. Without getting into detail, trust me when I tell you that Caesar is getting his fair share from me. The Imperial Governor of Maryland is getting his pound of flesh too, even though he insists that I’m rich and should be happy to pay even more. St. Mary’s County, the City of Memphis, and Shelby County are all still getting a nice healthy check every year. Every time I turn around, it seems some taxing authority is digging their hand just a little deeper into my pocket… and if I don’t smile and thank them for it, I’m labeled a racist, a bad citizen, greedy, or heartless. Occasionally, I’ve been called all of them at once.

Like it or not, believe it or not, it’s going to be people like me (and most of you reading this), who end up paying the bill because our elected leaders want to play chicken with a trillion dollar economy. No matter what they tell you now, it’s our taxes – local, state, and federal –are going to go up. We’re the ones who are going to lose our jobs, some for the second and third time in a decade. We’re the ones who should be most outraged by the personal damage being inflicted on us and the inestimable damage being inflicted on the country… but hey, it’s Christmas time, and we wouldn’t want to let a calamity of historic proportions get in the way of our national shopping spree.

If we get to the 1st of the year and don’t see fewer dollars in our paychecks, if we don’t see massive cuts to important programs, if we don’t see an economy tipped back into the abyss, I’ll happily apologize and publicly eat my words right here in my own house. I’m just a guy sitting here paying attention and I hope beyond hope that I’m reading the tealeaves wrong… but I don’t think I am. And I think the worst is yet to come.

Euro Trash…

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Free and open elections are wonderful things, except for the part where people tend to elect the kind of leaders they deserve instead of the kind they actually need. Getting yourself elected on a platform of more spending, lowering the retirement age, taxing the rich, and saying the hell with the global finance system is pretty much a cakewalk. Politics 101 is pretty much focused on telling the people whatever they need to hear to give you their vote. Unfortunately, Politics 410 is the real world practice of how to govern once you find yourself taking over the plush new office you won in the last election. I suspect our friends in France are going to discover that governing is a far more problematic exercise than simply getting elected.

We live in a wildly interconnected world, particularly when it comes to the economy. Unrest in Europe, bad decisions, and blatant disregard for economic fundamentals will ripple across the Atlantic and wash up on our shores as tidal waves if a balance in the system isn’t maintained. For a hundred years, the United States could be counted on to prop up the international economy in times of distress. This week, this month, this year, the story is a little different. We aren’t in a position to flood the market with liquidity. We’re just barely in a position to eek out positive GDP growth for ourselves, keeping our proverbial head above water as it were… Even that’s required borrowing completely unsustainable amounts of money.

The system, for the moment, is in a perilous balance. Trying to go it alone based on election year promises seems like a sure recipe for upending what small measure of stability the marketplace has managed to achieve this year. I just hope our friends across the pond have the good sense to know the difference between electioneering and governing. If they don’t, well, the global economy and our own personal economies could be a much more brutal looking place a year from now. Might as well open the door on a new bloody Dark Age.

See, and people say I can’t be hopelessly optimistic.

The joys of home ownership…

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Like pretty much everyone who purchased a house before 2007, I’m still trying to make my peace with the fact that my one time castle is worth about what it would have been had I bought it in 2002. It doesn’t quite make me want to jump off a bridge, but it does cry out for me to bash my head repeatedly against a blunt surface. I never expected my house to make me rich, but I had hoped it would, at least, have the decency not to make me poor. Since I had the foresight to buy just at the peak of the market, I’m doing my best to make peace with probably always having a house in Memphis… Unless it burns to the ground or otherwise gets smited by the finger of an angry God, the chances of being able to sell the place and just break even anytime in the next two decades would appear to be running somewhere between slim and none. That’s an obnoxious reality that I’m doing my best to ignore for the time being.

We’re a nation of 300 million souls and growing. They all have to live somewhere right? Surely at some point someone will be interested enough in a nice three bedroom, two bath house in Memphis to not make me feel like the prettiest guy in the prison shower when we get to the closing table.

Tax refund and spend…

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The problem with tax refunds is they take all year to accru and a grand total of 96 hours to spend. I’ve got to admit that I was a bit overzealous at paying off a few move related bills that had been hanging out there for a while, and added a few new pieces of kit to my electronics and accessories collection, but still, it feels like it should have lasted longer than it did. There’s exactly $500 left over earmarked to bail my truck out of the body shop on Friday, but other than that, we’re back to the regular monthly budget. I seem to vaguely remember when my tax refund was considered “fun” money. Maybe I just imagined that, though.

I think one of the most unpleasant aspects of being an adult that no one bother to warn you about when you were a kid is that the sums of money that seemed mind boggling and unattainable when you got your first job flipping burgers will very quickly become just what it takes to get by and maybe stash a bit aside for the future. My definition or “rich” and “making good money” have certainly changed in the last fifteen years, regardless of what the Governor of Maryland wants me to believe. I know paying the bills is the “right” thing to do, but damn, there just isn’t much fun in it.

State of the Union…

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In the strictest possible sense, the state of the Union, is peachy. It’s not like we have states threatening to join up with Canada or Mexico or anything. We’re in the middle of a presidential election cycle where if the incumbent is turned out of office we’ll most likely see yet another peaceful transition of executive authority. Considering world demographics, even the least among us is doing better than the large majority of everyone else on the planet. We survived our capital city being sacked. We survived a brutal civil war and then fought in the war to end all wars before getting pulled into the war after that. In between these wars, we survived finical panics and Great Depressions, pestilence, and famine. Despite it all, we’re still here and managed to cure contagious diseases, send a man to the moon, and connect the world with nothing more than electrons. Keep in mind, we did all those things in our free time when we weren’t occupied dealing with the big stuff. That’s my big picture thinking about the state of the Union, anyway.

If you distill the state of the Union down to the question of whether you’re better off now than you were four years ago, the response probably isn’t as positive. There are plenty of people who can’t find work, can’t buy or sell a house, and at best have spent the last four or five years treading water at best and being pulled under at worst. It’s not an easy time for America and it’s not an easy time to be American. It’s easy to be an optimist when Wall Street only goes higher and unemployment runs at 3%. It’s a hell of a lot harder to be an optimist when you can’t find a job or you’re going to bed hungry at night.

So, you ask, what’s really the state of the Union? Well, it’s probably somewhere between the two extremes. That’s where reality tends to live. It’s neither as strong nor as weak as the pundits and politicos make it out to be. The United States, warts and all, is still the shining example of how to be a republic. Local, State, and Federal governments fight one another. Political parties fight with everyone. Even the separate branches of the same government are locked in Byzantine conflict. Somehow we muddle through without veering too far left or too far right. Dysfunctional as it is, the process is still a wonder to behold. With financial crisis spreading through Europe, our lifeblood oil flowing from the Middle East, and the supply chain for our consumer goods that stretches all over Asia, we Americans are once again learning that we have to engage with the world – the whole world. The future, and a far stronger Union, lie in the direction of cooperation, consensus, and international competition. It’s a hard lesson, but one well worth learning.

Go global…

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Say what you want about the evils of the global economy, but I’m an unabashed fan. Sure, it means we have to compete with countries that can manufacture just about everything cheaper than we can, but I think that misses the up side… Like being able to order something from Europe last night at 9:30 and having it sitting in Philadelphia 18 hours later waiting to clear Customs and get delivered to your door. I mean isn’t a little friendly competition a small price to pay for that kind of luxury and convenience?

I’ve traveled enough to know that the world’s too small a place to pretend that we can raise the drawbridge and keep everything out. By all means, we should regulate it, set the conditions under which it happens, and fight hard in those areas where we have a comparative advantage, but we can’t roll back the clock on international commerce any more than we can command the tides to go in or out. We need to encourage the kind of world where we can order anything, from anywhere and have it delivered in a day or two. It’s good for us as consumers, it’s good for them as merchants and manufacturers, and it forces us to take a realistic look at the kinds of things our own economy should be doing in the future. If going global isn’t a win-win scenario, I don’t know what is.