Archive for September, 2008
Your Urgent Help Needed
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.
This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA, and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.
Yours Faithfully
Minister of Treasury Paulson
Barry Eichengren links the current financial crisis to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which separated commercial from investment banking. But as Alex Tabarrok shows the history of Glass-Steagall goes beyond economics and was the product of a titanic struggle between the Rockefellers and the House of Morgan.
Underneath the current crisis and response are similar struggles among real interests – banks, investment companies, the tech sector, oil and natural resources – but I can’t find anyone, anywhere providing commentary into these real interests. There is nothing even remotely similar to the hearings, reports, and exposes Tabarrock identifies during the 1930s to what is (or is not happening) today.
To better understand the increasingly mobile workforce, Knoll recently surveyed over 500 mobile workers employed by 84 different organizations. Here are some findings from their resulting 2007 report.
Demographic profile:
- 65% over age 40
- 65% male, 35 % female
- 82% married or living common law
Role and/or status in their organization:
- 80% held professional, managerial or executive positions
- 75% work more than 40 hours per week
Mobile workers “at the office”:
- 75% of mobile workers use “the office” for face-to-face meetings with co-workers, clients, and to socialize.
- 50% said they needed conference room space at their primary office, but typically had trouble finding it.
- 64% of mobile workers reported having an assigned workstation or private office at “work” with the majority commenting that they rarely used it, needing collaborative space more when at the office.
- 23% of mobile workers used unassigned workspaces or team spaces at “the office”
Other interesting facts:
- 61% of mobile workers say they do their best work at home. When asked to describe that work, the majority said it involved writing, reading, creating presentations, creative thinking, and correspondence.
- 25% reported doing their best work “at the office” and 8% reported client premises as the most productive place. A handful reported cafes or other as the best place to work.
- 90% of mobile workers use a lap top as their primary technology.
Are you mobile?
Do you fit the profile above?
For me: I’m semi-mobile, under age 40, married, work less than 40 hours (for my employer), managerial / professional. At the office, I collaborate during formal and informal face-to-face meetings; collaborate or research/interview on the phone; do smaller research or reading or writing tasks – for all these tasks, the office is the most efficient place. At home, I tend to do bigger research or writing projects – for this work, home is the most productive place.
Geographer John Agnew and his UCLA colleagues have used satellite images of light emissions to track the effectiveness of the so-called “surge.” (h/t: Alison Kemper) Their conclusion: the surge has not worked to restore stability.
Night light in neighborhoods populated primarily by embattled Sunni residents declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never returned, suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit, the team reports in a new study based on publicly available satellite imagery … The night-light signature in four other large Iraqi cities — Kirkuk, Mosul, Tikrit and Karbala — held steady or increased between the spring of 2006 and the winter of 2007, the UCLA team found. None of these cities were targets of the surge.
Baghdad’s decreases were centered in the southwestern Sunni strongholds of East and West Rashid, where the light signature dropped 57 percent and 80 percent, respectively, during the same period. By contrast, the night-light signature in the notoriously impoverished, Shiite-dominated Sadr City remained constant, as it did in the American-dominated Green Zone. Light actually increased in Shiite-dominated New Baghdad, the researchers found. Until just before the surge, the night-light signature of Baghdad had been steadily increasing overall …
The full study is here.
New York Times nonfiction bestsellers on the candidates.
No. 2 – The Obama Nation - “The Democratic candidate as an extreme leftist.”
No. 5 – The Case Againts Barack Obama – “The Democratic candidate as a calculating extreme leftist.”
No. 9 – Faith of my Fathers – “A family memoir of the Arizona Senator and Republican Presidential Candidate.”
No, 13 – Sarah – You know who …
On Friday, the U.S. Treasury took some extraordinary, extraordinarily risky, and probably doomed to failure, steps to bailout the financial institutions and speculators that dominate the U.S. economy. As with the previous and ever more panicked bailouts, these were aimed at preserving liquidity at the largest financial firms at an incredible cost to the U.S. taxpayers.
When considering such complicated phenomenon, metaphors and analogies can help. I think of the situation as an ecosystem in collapse. In any ecosystem the peak organisms such as sharks and whales are dependent upon an entire food pyramid that extends ultimately down to the plants and plankton that fix energy (do work and create value). In the U.S., but also in the global economy, we are seeing the peak organisms in sectors such as the finance, insurance, and real estate in severe convulsions and even dying. Firms in whole sectors such as the investment banks are no longer viable. In response, the U.S. government is plying them with bailouts and other measures to keep them on life support. The U.S. Treasury is openly manipulating the economy’s fever chart, the stock market. In each and every case, this has provided temporary relief, but not addressed any of the crises. This is not surprising because the decisions are being made behind closed doors by a small group of insiders whose whole experience is in the peak organisms. They cannot accept that the model that made them wealthy and successful has ended up destroying the plankton. So their response in every one of these ever larger and more frequent bailouts has been to transfer from the plankton to the peak organisms.
A more creative way of thinking is to recognize that what must be recuperated is the plankton. This will have to be funded by dramatic increases in taxation of the wealthy and a carbon tax to reduce energy usage to be transferred to the poor and middle classes. It is not too early to begin thinking about programs such as a new environmentally oriented Civilian Conservation Corps that would install energy efficiency and solar energy devices on new homes. A Works Progress Administration would undertake similar programs for public buildings and transit – this could be combined with a public arts program. Given the shocking lack of educational attainment in the U.S., another program could be to educate America. These programs would be labor-intensive and funnel U.S. dollars into the U.S. rather than being spent on imports from abroad. Programs spent on assisting the plankton and, at least, partially paid for by those to which so much was given is a far more creative solution than one that only bailouts the banks.
I believe fashioning an affirmative and creative response to the current financial disorder requires understanding where the problems are located and fashioning responses that target those locations. So far, I have heard nothing from either of the two leading candidates that they have an inkling of profoundness of the situation.
I would be interested to hear what have you folks have been thinking about the current crisis?
Today is the first day of Singles Week. The Census Bureau tees it off with some interesting and fun factoids (h/t: Kevin Stolarick).
- 92 million – Number of unmarried Americans 18 and older in 2006. This group comprised 42 percent of all U.S. residents 18 and older.
- 54% – Percentage of unmarried Americans 18 and older who are women.
- 60% - Percentage of unmarried Americans 18 and older who have never been married. Another 25 percent are divorced, and 15 percent are widowed.
- 86 – Number of unmarried men 18 and older for every 100 unmarried women in the United States.
- 50.7 million – Number of households maintained by unmarried men or women. These households comprise 44 percent of households nationwide.
- 30.5 million – Number of people who live alone. They comprise 27 percent of all households, up from 17 percent in 1970.
- 35% - Percentage of births in the last 12 months, as of 2006, to women who either were separated, widowed, divorced or never married.
- 39% – Percentage of opposite-sex, unmarried-partner households that include children.
- 6 million – Number of unmarried-partner households in 2006. These include 5.2 million of the opposite sex and 780,000 of the same sex.
- 24% - Percentage of unmarried people 25 and older in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree or more education.
Singles Week and the creative class – what are your thoughts?
Here’s something interesting…
So Maclean’s did a nice article about a recent study measuring “Learning,” from the Canadian Council of Learning. The name of the article is “Canada’s Smartest Cities.”
But I wondered about the difference or connection between Smarts and Learning, so I did a search of the meaty 45-page report – and found zero (nada, zilch, l’oeuf) instances of the word “Smart.” The authors were plainly sensitive to the issues surrounding labeling something as “smart.”
I’ve wondered about this frequently. Is it elitist to value higher education? By celebrating smartness, are we in essence devaluing those who have not had the opportunities or chosen the path to higher learning?
I confess, I enjoy being around smart people. I find a strong connection between well-educated people and those who are open, tolerant, inquisitive, far seeing, and inclusive. But I’ve also found some of the most maddening people in well-educated professionals – rude, selfish, entitled, unsympathetic, and petty. (They make me want to hang out in a trailer park, or some other low-rent neighborhood where anything goes.)
I still think that the educational attainment of city or community is one of the best measures of a place’s quality of life. Generally, better-educated citizenry make tougher and better decisions for the future, and see value in making a community better for all, not just their peers.
That’s the question confronting Crystal City, Missouri – a small town outside St. Louis – according to today’s Wall Street Journal. Apparently, an old glass factory which was the centerpiece of the area’s economy closed in 1990. The community has morphed into a small commuter suburb with 4,200 residents. But now, plans have surfaced to build a new pig-iron smelter on the site providing between 120 and 700 jobs, igniting community debate. The issue, according to WSJ reporter Tim Aeppel, comes down to this.
On one side are those welcoming almost any decent-paying job, even relatively “dirty” ones, as employment that the community otherwise wouldn’t have. The other side is dominated by those who see certain kinds of development as worse than no jobs at all.
If you were the town’s mayor or economic development director what would you do?