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Stock Market Record! Congrats- You’re Back to Zero!
A lot of happy headlines today as the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbs to heights never before seen. I checked my retirement accounts and I am, indeed, doing nicely. But compared to what?
Compared to 5 and half years ago- we’re now back to where we started. Compared to ten years ago, stocks have averaged only a .6% increase in value. And for giddy investors there’s always this helpful MarketWatch headline: Legendary Hedge-Fund Manager: This Will End Badly.
What are the markets so exuberant about anyway? Unemployment at 8%? Adjusted for inflation, your take-home pay buys 8% less than it did in 2007. Last time we hit record highs on Wall Street your home was worth 26% more than it is today and that’s counting a recent housing rebound. Some 14 million homeowners still have property that’s worth less today than when they bought it. Mark Gongloff has all the stats in this piece in the Huffington Post.
Perhaps the markets are responding enthusiastically to that newfound spirit of compromise on Capitol Hill? Oh- that’s right, we’re still careening from one manufactured budget crisis to the next.
All these reasons for the stock market not to be happy worry me. It’s a nice fantasyland if you’re lucky enough to have a 401k or an IRA- but if you don’t- this little roller coaster ride means nothing except that a bunch of rich people are doing better than you…and even at that- they’re only standing still.
Hate to be the skunk at the garden party, as they say. And I’ll take the rally since the alternative really sucks. But careful out there…irrational exuberance has bitten us in the derriere before.
Facebook Fail
I’m no financial expert which, I presume, is why I’m not a wealthy man. But I’m not an idiot either and I’m telling you right now- this Facebook IPO stuff is an unmitigated disaster that is becoming more and more of an embarrassment by the second.
Let’s start out with the basics. Facebook early this week was valued as a $100 billion company. That’s more than Disney, Visa or McDonald’s. As Washington Post financial writer, Dominic Basulto, puts it- at least McDonald’s sells burgers. What’s Facebook got? What does Facebook make? It makes ads that no one pays any attention to. Ask General Motors. They pulled their Facebook ads just a couple of days ahead of the IPO because it was like throwing money into a large black hole.
We’ve been down this road before in the late 1990’s when the Dot.Com bubble burst. Now it’s the social media bubble that’s bursting. Facebook stock was offered initially at $38 a share. It’s trading at $31 this afternoon, but the day is young- there’s plenty more room for it to fall even further. Your average Facebook employee is about $2 million richer this week. But the poor people who got suckered into buying Facebook stock on Monday have already suffered a 20% loss on their investment—an amazing achievement over just two short days.
Some analysts say in order to justify the share price at which Facebook was being offered the company would have to make more than a 40% profit over each of the next three years. That’s a tall order for any company that actually makes things, much less one that is essentially a large data collection service that can’t quite figure out what do with all its data.
I won’t even go into the speculation about the things Facebook must do to make the kind of money it has to pile up to avoid becoming a penny stock. Maybe selling our personal data? Maybe overwhelming its real estate on your computer with ad after ad after ad? Maybe breaking down and finally charging for the service?
And then there’s Facebook’s growth potential. What growth? It has already saturated the world. A half a billion users are already on it. There’s no way to go but down.
I have a friend who counsels adolescents. He tells me the big social media trend among the nation’s youth is getting the hell off Facebook. Presuming the universal adolescent appeal of “coolness,” Facebook is about the least cool thing in the universe. Their grandmothers are on it, for Christ’s sake. And their teachers. And if they can ever find jobs- their damn bosses will be on Facebook asking to friend them so they can check and see if there are any pictures of them projectile vomiting in an alley after an all-night kegger.
But there’s more. Much, much more. Here are some headlines from Marketwatch.com today so we can all revel in the base greediness and irrational exuberance of the great Facebook IPO.
Facebook Stock Dubbed “Falling Knife”
How Facebook Threatens the U.S. Economy
Here’s an absolute brilliant analysis of all of this by Martketwatch.com’s David Wiedner:
It’s as if Mark Zuckerberg is having the ultimate nerd’s revenge: He’s humiliating all of us and taking our money in the process…
There were few regular people who made fortunes on Facebook. Its private placement and exclusive club made certain that Zuckerberg and his backers decided who would get rich and when….
At the end of a Facebook session, we feel an anticlimax. We hope for contact and more often than not get silence. We exploit our own privacy to our friends, advertisers, strangers. We rarely, if ever, make that connection that’s worth the investment of putting so much of ourselves out there…
In the end, it’s clear Facebook’s was the rare initial public offering in the markets that catered to that same kind of person, an exclusive sort of investor: the sucker.
In 2010, the movie “The Social Network,” told the story of the Harvard nerd who hit it big with his Facebook concept. There’s a sequel ahead that’s sure to be a hit with all those people Mark Zuckerberg has taken for a ride for all these years. And it will be called “The Fall of Mark Zuckerberg: Avenging the Revenge of the Nerds.”
Bi-Polar Stock Market-Watching Syndrome (BPSMW)
I need to see a psychiatrist. BPSMW syndrome has gotten the best of me. Doctor, I keep glancing at MarketWatch and Bloomberg every three minutes. I can’t take it anymore.
When the Dow drops 600 points, I get all depressed and panicky and want to come home and kick the dog. When it rises 423 as it just did today, I get all giddy and happy and skippy (that’s a condition in which you start skipping suddenly, rapidly and uncontrollably).
I’ve tried to wean myself off the market cold-turkey. It’s not working. I pass a TV and shoot a quick, secretive glance to see if there’s a red arrow or a green arrow in the corner of the screen. I actually now hate anything that’s the color red.
I’ve started enjoying long meetings at work because I have, as of yet, not loaded any market-alert apps on my phone and suddenly three hours go by and I remember what life used to be like before my life savings and supposed retirement evaporated before my eyes every other hour.
When the market goes in the crapper, I slap myself for not having taken my money out and invested in gold bullion. When it rockets upward, I congratulate myself for being so calm and level-headed when the truth of the matter is I am actually suffering from Bi-Polar Investment Paralysis, a secondary condition characterized mostly by extreme fear and uncertainty of doing anything remotely financial.
A friend of mine recently recommended Chart Therapy. This is where you pull out a ten year chart of Wall Street’s gyrations and realize these current antics are but tiny little blips even though they look like gigantic Swiss mountains when you’re monitoring them by the minute.
This I know. I am exhausted and weary and I trust those poor men and women on the floor of the exchange must be as well. I think by now we are all longing for the magic words, “The Dow Jones Industrial Average today, was unchanged on low volume and no particularly newsworthy events.”
Missouri Mom Tells Off S&P
Lucy Nobbe from Kirkwood, Missouri decided to take matters into her own hands. She rented a plane and a banner and flew over Standard & Poor’s Manhattan offices Tuesday with this message: “Thanks for the downgrade- you should all be fired.”
Representing the outrage felt by tens of millions of Americans over S&P’s downgrade of the United States to AA+ status last Friday, Lucy had enough. She says she initially planned to fly over the Capitol building with the same message for our nation’s gridlocked lawmakers, but realized airspace restrictions over Washington, D.C. would have resulted in an escort from F16 jet fighters and an interview with the Secret Service so she did the next best thing.
To many, many people, S&P’s actions last week smacks them as deeply unpatriotic. The symbolic downgrade has helped send the nation’s and the world’s stock markets into turmoil and caused millions of people sleepless nights as they watch their 401K’s sink into oblivion. S&P then promptly downgraded Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which should now make it more expensive for people to get home loans in an already depressed housing market. And they’re not done yet as S&P has now embarked on a downgrading spree; targeting states, counties and municipalities across the nation.
And even if S&P’s message about a dysfunctional American political system was painfully true- their mission is supposed to be grading companies and countries on their credit-worthiness. As their actions helped cause the markets to tank, their own case for the downgrade was belied by the fact the entire world went to the safest haven they could find- the very U.S. Treasuries S&P had just said were unreliable.
As it was there were two parts to S&P’s downgrade message; one economic and one about the political gridlock in DC. As they got the math wrong and overstated the size of the debt by $2 trillion, they admitted their error, dropped the economic argument and presented only the political one.
We don’t need to get into the fact S&P had given Enron a AAA rating until just about the day they went bankrupt, gave sterling ratings to companies who held worthless subprime mortgage loans four years ago, and missed the European debt crisis until it was well underway. It’s more primal than all that. They downgraded America.
And Lucy Nobbe, a single mom and broker who knows a thing or two about finance ended up spending $900 to rent the plane and the banner and make her voice heard over the offices of Standard & Poor’s, speaking for millions of others who continue to scratch their heads at the gridlock and the insanity of it all.
Economic Choices: Between Terrible and Worse
Can we be realistic here? The debt ceiling “compromise” signed into law Tuesday fixes nothing and ensures continuing uncertainty in financial markets and more ideological warfare in the months ahead. But congratulations Washington for putting the matches away and not burning the house down.
As all sides hold their noses while they get a good look at this really ugly baby, here’s what has not been accomplished.
Deficit Reduction: A little bit- but not much. $2.4 trillion over ten years against a $14 trillion debt with most of the cuts still to be determined by a “Super” committee of 12 angry, feuding lawmakers who start meeting around Thanksgiving. This ought to give us that much more to be grateful for.
Reduction in Entitlement Programs: They’re responsible for most of the debt but even the draconian cuts that automatically take place if our angry, feuding lawmakers can’t come to an agreement- don’t address Social Security, Medicaid or Medicare recipients. Some think this a good thing with a reeling economy causing so much misery but for a so-called attempt to bring spending in line, not a smart move to ignore consideration of the major contributors to the national debt.
Revenue: Two major commissions that set about to solve deficit-spending in the past year both came to identical conclusions. It cannot be accomplished by cutting alone. This is not about partisanship- it’s about math. There were plenty of Republicans on both these panels who endorsed the concept of raising revenue as a part of balancing budgets. See this column in the Washington Post that discusses these commissions and their discoveries. Alan Greenspan, one of the last human beings on the planet you would expect to favor tax increases is now in favor of exactly that. Blogged about it a few months ago.
Rational Process: We will forever more be holding future extensions of the nation’s debt ceiling hostage to the ideological flavors and fights of the day. This has nothing to do with party. Other than whichever party is out of the White House will, from now on, be pushing the nation’s economy to the brink in order to extract whatever it can from perpetually horrified future Presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike.
The Current Economic Mess: The 1,000 point Dow Jones meltdown that would have been expected had the debt ceiling not been passed was replaced instead by a 265 point meltdown out of fears stoked by today’s weak and struggling economy that the debt ceiling agreement does little to address.
But in the end, was it a good thing the debt ceiling bill passed? Well, as Alan Greenspan put it so eloquently in September of 2010, “Our choice is not between good and bad but between terrible and worse.”
Barack- Love the New You- But You’re Wiping Out My 401K
I heard the new populist version of President Obama at a Town Hall meeting in Ohio today. I remember this guy. Looks amazingly similar to a fellow I saw campaigning about a year and half ago. Just might work. He’s a very attractive candidate.
One favor though, Mr. President. Is there any chance you could give these fiery anti-Wall Street speeches sometime after 4pm, ET?
You see, everytime CNBC shows you talking about sticking it to the banks, those crazy guys on the floor of the New York stock exchange put in sell orders. Lots and lots of sell orders. The market has now lost 400 points in two days and it seems to coincide precisely to those moments you’re speaking live on cable TV.
I love you, but you’re killing me, man. My 401K is taking a beating.
Next passionate populist-guy town hall speech- 4:30pm. Please? No, seriously.
Top Stories of ’09: A List of the Lists
For the past several weeks, writers and editors at various media outlets, wire services, newspapers, magazines and web sites have been busy little beavers, compiling their lists of the big stories of 2009. As a helpful guide, I have superficially scoured the web for some of these lists, point out some of the highlights and offer a few links to make it all convenient for you.
The Serious
The grand-daddy of them all is the Associated Press list of the top ten stories of the year as voted on by U.S. Editors and News Directors. The #1 story was the tanking and slow recovery of the American economy.
THE ECONOMY: Despite a $787 billion federal stimulus package, much of the U.S. economy continued to sputter throughout the year. The jobless rate topped 10 percent, scores of banks failed, the federal deficit tripled to a record $1.4 trillion, and stocks fell to their lowest levels since 1997 before rallying. Yet investment banks’ profits surged, triggering public anger and efforts in Washington to crack down on Wall Street bonuses.
For the kiddies, Scholastic.com puts the Obama inauguration at the top of the list:
A Historic Inauguration
On January 20, Barack Obama became the 44th U.S. President—and the country’s first African-American chief executive. Obama’s swearing-in ceremony drew a record crowd of 1.8 million people. That made it the biggest event ever held in Washington, D.C. The crowd stood for hours in freezing cold temperatures to witness the event. “We gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord,” the new President told the nation.
The Twitter World
Reuter’s rounds up the top ten “weird” twitter stories of ’09. Topping their list is one man’s compulsive tweeting- including this live, breathless account from his own wedding:
Standing at the alter with @TracyPage where just a second ago she became my wife! Gotta go, time to kiss the bride” is how Dana Hanna kept the world posted between “I do” and that kiss.
Politico.com offers an interesting list of top ten tweets of 2009. At the top, Newt Gingrich’s tweet for which he later apologized in which he called Supreme Court nominee, Sonya Sotomayor a racist:
The former GOP Speaker of the House got a little ahead of himself at 9:34 a.m. on May 27, when he declared that Supreme Court nominee Sonya Sotomayor was a “racist.”
“White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw,” Gingrich tweeted. He was incensed over Sotomayor’s comment about a “wise Latina” being able to make a better decision than a white male because of her life experience.
But several days later, Gingrich hit the rhetorical “delete” button. “My initial reaction was strong and direct — perhaps too strong and too direct,” Gingrich said in a Web posting. He regretted calling Sotomayor a racist. Gingrich had done a 180 — within 140 characters.
And though not a tweet, Sarah Palin’s famous Facebook entry on health care “death panels,” simultaneously enraged some and caused others great glee:
Here’s the meat of Palin’s post on Facebook: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.”
On the Medical Front
The Harvard Medical School’s top story for 2009 is about a story that has turned out not to be a story- the H1N1, Swine Flu pandemic:
After the first several weeks of uncertainty, most of the news about the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic has been reassuring. Much of that has to do with the nature of the H1N1 virus itself, which spreads easily and makes people sick, but so far rarely in a life-threatening way. And the word pandemic is misunderstood: a disease is considered pandemic if it has spread globally and affects a larger-than-usual proportion of the population. The disease needn’t be severe.
But a major reason for the calm has been the measured public health response. Plenty of information has been made available (this is the first Internet-age pandemic). A vaccine was developed and put into production, although shortages are a serious concern. Health officials gave us simple, concrete things to do to protect ourselves and others: cough and sneeze into your sleeve, wash your hands often, get vaccinated with both the seasonal and H1N1 flu vaccines, stay home if you’re feeling sick.
This wasn’t the flu pandemic that the experts were expecting. For years, they’ve eyed the H5N1 bird flu virus circulating in Asia to see if it would mutate and become transmissible among humans. Instead, H1N1 emerged in Mexico with a complicated quadruple pedigree: two strains of swine flu, a human strain, and a bird one. Hospitalization and death rates from the new virus have been high in healthy young adults and quite low in people older than 60. One explanation for that pattern is that older people may have some immunity left over from exposure to a previous version of H1N1.
In the World of Sports
The Los Angles Times’ #2 sports story of the year was Tom Watson’s improbable bid for another British Open title, which really was a nearly-great moment in sports history:
Jack Nicklaus was home watching — for the first time in his life, he says — an entire round of golf on television. Tom Watson was watching the flight of his eight-iron land right where he wanted it to on Turnberry’s 18th green . . . and then inexplicably keep rolling and rolling until it eventually trickled off the green. He putted down the slope from the collar and was left with a putt that would have made him the oldest player to win the British Open . . . by 11 years. He missed and lost a playoff to Stewart Cink. “It tears at your gut,” Watson said, but quickly told crestfallen reporters, “This ain’t a funeral, you know.”
The New York Daily News’ top three sports stories were Tiger Wood’s infidelities, Alex Rodriguez’ steroid admissions and, of course, the New York Yankees 27th World Series title.
Tech World
Computer World’s #2 story is Microsoft’s launch of Windows 7, the new computer operating system that replaces the atrocious Vista OS:
Microsoft launches Windows 7 — we can all move on now
On Oct. 22, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took the stage in downtown New York at the lead event for a somewhat — for the software giant — soft-edged launch for Windows 7. Ballmer presided over a day of speechmaking and sales promotions in cities worldwide. But the events were on the whole smaller than the usual major Microsoft launches. The scaled-back hoopla and the marketing mantra of “simplicity” fit Microsoft’s characterization of the new OS — above all, faster and more straightforward to use than its predecessor, Vista. That much-maligned OS was plagued by hardware compatibility problems, slow performance and annoying system alerts. The older Windows XP, as of the Win 7 launch, was still being used by more than 70 percent of computer users. Microsoft, no doubt happy to turn the page on an embarrassing chapter in its history, says Win 7 is being adopted faster than Vista.
Celebrities and Wannabe Celebrities
E-online has a first place tie for its entertainment stories of the year. It’s Tiger and the death of Michael Jackson.
Something called TVSquad.com has a list of the top TV reality show scandals of the year. Balloon Boy was #1 and coming in 4th and how could anybody’s list be complete without them- the notorious White House party crashers, Michaele and Tareq Salahi.
Special Bonus List
Saving the best and most lascivious for last, HuffingtonPost.com lists and has a gallery (that shows nothing, by the way) of the top sex tapes of the decade (excuse me- but how 1990’s):
Paris Hilton wins top honors.
Tomorrow…helpful links to lists of the best stories of the decade of which the above item was but a mere tease.
Wall Street, Bankers and the White House
They’re finally getting called to the woodshed. The heads of American Express, Bank of America, Capital One, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo meet with President Obama today at the White House. It occurs to me that this is not all that dissimilar to something that occurred 47 years ago when John F. Kennedy when toe-to-toe with Big Steel. Sometimes the power of the Presidency can do wonders to reign in greed.
Back then, of course, it was a different world. Steel prices were a very big deal because the nation was still in post-World War II expansion and steel was the key behind the development of the interstate highway system, the auto and airline industries and the growth of the housing industry, then in the process of building America’s great suburbs.
In a nutshell, the Kennedy Administration had spent a great deal of time and effort mediating a major dispute between the steel industry and its labor unions in an effort to hold down the costs of steel. The Labor Secretary of the time, Arthur Goldberg, used his considerable influence with labor to help hammer out a deal in which there were no wage hikes and only modest increases in fringe benefits.
Three days later, the major steel producers announced a 3.5% across-the-board increase in prices. It was a slap in the face to the White House- as if to say “government has no role to play in the private sector, stay out of our business.” And of course, they had just benefited from the government’s intervention in their own labor problems to hold down the cost of union contracts. Do you see an analogy building here?
The U.S. saves the banking sector by offering huge tax-payer bail-outs and how do they respond? Just like Big Steel did in 1962. Only in this case the slap in the face wasn’t a mere price increase. Banks got intensely tight-fisted with their lending. They hiked interest rates on credit cards to loan-shark levels. While the nation’s unemployment rate spiked above 10%, thanks to government bail-outs, they prospered and Wall Street went right back to handing out huge bonuses.
Here’s what Kennedy did when he took on the steel industry:
1) The Justice department swung into action and announced it was investigating possible price-fixing.
2) The Pentagon announced it would enter into contracts only with steel companies that had bucked U.S. Steel and other big companies and kept their prices low.
3) The President held a news conference to explain why the steel companies were not acting in the public interest.
“The pubic interest.” Now that’s an interesting phrase. It implies that hand-in-hand with the raw and necessary capitalistic impulses of making profits, there might also be a sense of responsibility to the nation. Big Steel capitulated in less than a week and rolled back the price increases.
Likewise, the message is beginning to seep through to Big Banking. Even they are beginning to sense how disconnected they are from their customers. On 60 Minutes Sunday night, President Obama did the equivalent of JFK’s Big Steel news conference.
I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street. They don’t get it. They’re still puzzled why it is that people are mad at the banks. Well, let’s see. You guys are drawing down ten million, twenty million dollar bonuses after America went through the worst economic year that it’s gone through in decades, and you guys caused the problem.
Well, what do you know? Politico.com is reporting this morning that banking leaders will tell the President today that they are ready to “step up.”
Every CEO that’s participating is ready to a) listen and b) step up,” said an industry executive familiar with plans for the meeting. Everybody’s goal is to come out of the meeting with actionable, constructive and measurable things that the industry can do to spur recovery.
The bankers do make a legitimate case that they cannot return to the crazy drunken lending they offered to unqualified subprime mortgage customers that helped screw the economy in the first place. But, surely, even they have to realize the difference between that kind of lending and, say, small business loans. There will always be risk. But some kinds are manageable and some kinds are not.
Let’s hope they’re smart enough to figure out the difference and that the White House and the little people continue to hold their feet to the fire. Our jobs and our way of life are dependent on it.
The Week in Review: Dec. 7- Dec. 11/2009
Remembering the week’s events so you don’t have to!
Monday 12/7/09
♦ The week starts off with welcome news for millions of parents. Zhu Zhu pets will not kill their children after all. Over the weekend, a California product-rating web site had claimed the hit toy of the Christmas season contained high levels of a fire retardant called antimony that can cause heart and lung problems with chronic exposure. The Consumer Product Safety Commission issues a statement saying- nuh uh (paraphrasing). Turned out GoodGuide had conducted faulty testing that failed to meet government standards-the antimony levels were fine. Officially, parents are cleared to return to not finding the toys at stores. The loveable furry rodents that are supposed to sell for $10 a piece continue selling online for $100.
♥ Tiger Wood’s wife reportedly moves out of their Florida home.
♦ The Gallup polling organization’s daily EKG of the President’s approval ratings drops below 50%. He is now down to 47%, among the lowest approval numbers for a new President in modern history. Pundits with White House connections say Obama advisors liken the situation to the Reagan administration’s first term when the nation was in the deep recession that effectively ended the hyper-inflation of the Carter years but at a high cost to millions of newly unemployed. The economy eventually recovered and so did Reagan’s initially bad poll numbers. Fox News trumpets the Gallup figures with serious fervor. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs responds that the White House pays no attention to poll numbers unless they’re good. Ok, he didn’t really say that last part.
♥ The number of women reported to have had affairs with Tiger Woods reaches seven.
Tuesday 12/8/09
♦ The big Climate Conference is underway in Copenhagen. “Climategate” enters the public lexicon in a big way as tens of thousands begin wondering why all scandals have to be named “gate.” Stolen e-mails and files from a British climate research center suggest temperature data may have been unethically manipulated. Representatives from a country with only a small stake in the debate over limiting carbon emissions officially raise the issue at the conference. Delegates from oil-rich Saudi Arabia declare the scandal raises serious questions about the basic premise behind the theory of global warming. Go ahead; take a moment to connect those last two sentences.
♥ Photos of Tiger Wood’s mother-in-law being wheeled into an ambulance on a stretcher at 2:30 in the morning becomes breaking news on all the cable networks. Quickly scrambled reporters breathlessly note the incredible irony that she has been taken to the same hospital where Tiger had been treated after his single-car accident. She was released the next day. For some reason, she had been experiencing stress.
♦ The Transportation Security Administration messes up big-time. Employees post TSA manuals online as part of the contract solicitation process. Not ordinarily a problem, except that sensitive details about airport security procedures that were supposed to be redacted- weren’t. Turns out the TSA employees thought they had hidden the classified stuff by covering the words in black. They should have actually deleted them. Apparently, clever, tech-savvy whiz kids can see right through the blackened segments in PDF files and soon the sensitive material makes its way onto the internet. Among other things, we now know what a CIA security credential looks like, that TSA workers don’t inspect wheelchairs or prosthetic devices, and that when it gets really busy at airports they only have to look at 20% of checked bags for explosives. This is why I take trains whenever possible.
♦ Monster waves hit Hawaii and surfers go nuts. San Clemente, California’s Greg Long, rides what is described as a massive, jaw-dropping 25-footer to a perfect score of 100 winning $55,000 at the prestigious 25th anniversary Quiksilver in Memory of Eddie Aikau contest on the North Shore of Oahu.
♥ The number of women linked to Tiger Woods reaches 10.
Wednesday 12/9/09
♦ Hump day is a busy news day, indeed. The President delivers a speech at the Brookings Institution in which he outlines tax cuts and other incentives to help small businesses both hire and invest. Since small businesses hire two-thirds of the American work force, some people see this as a good thing. The loyal opposition, which usually supports tax cuts for small businesses, objects loudly because the White House wants to pay for it with bank bail-out money that has been paid back faster than expected. They argue the $200 billion should go toward paying down the huge deficit. I pull out my handy calculator and put on my old-fashioned green accountant visor-thing. Let’s see, divide the $200 billion by the national debt which is currently $12,086,118,896,943. Convert to percentage. <Insert sound of fingers busily pressing calculator keys> Ah ha! Instead of tax cuts for small businesses so they can hire more people, we can take that money and reduce the deficit by 1.65%. Only 98.35% to go! Good deal!
♥ It is reported that national television ads that featured Tiger Woods have vanished from the airwaves and have not been broadcast since November 29th.
♦ The upper Midwest is hit hard by a massive winter storm that dumps one to three feet of snow and then moves eastward, eventually hitting New England. Buffalo gets buffaloed as it gets both the initial storm and then lake-effect snow later in the week.
♦ Five workers with the Transportation Security Administration are put on leave while an investigation is conducted into how they could be so clueless. See Tuesday, 12/8.
♥ A CNN/Gallup poll is released that finds Tiger Woods’ unfavorability rating has gone up from 9% to 25%. No one seems to notice that a married guy with two kids implicated in ten adulterous relationships still has a higher approval rating than the President of the United States.
♦ Sarah Palin writes an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post citing climategate, argues there is no consensus on global warming and concludes the President should boycott the Copenhagen conference. Liberal activists and some scientists criticize the Washington Post for publishing the article. They apparently have not heard that nobody actually reads newspapers anymore and that Sarah Palin’s Facebook friends list exceeds the paper’s total circulation. Sarah Palin has 1,097,360 Facebook friends. The Washington Post’s daily circulation is 637,180. On Sundays, it’s 890,163. I checked.
♦ Senate Democrats reach agreement on health care but nobody can quite figure out at first whether a public option is in or out. Turns out the compromise proposal would allow people to start paying for and getting Medicare coverage two years from now; minimum age-55. Since I am 53, I think, “Wow, how cool is that?”
♥ The number of women associated with Tiger Woods reaches 11.
Thursday, 12/10/09
♦ Barack Obama becomes the first sitting American President since Woodrow Wilson to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. It is widely accepted he’d been given the honor as a largely symbolic gesture for the change he represents rather than for anything he’s accomplished in a mere 11 months in the oval office. Awkward. But not really, because Obama starts the speech by openly admitting the accomplishments of previous recipients like Nelson Mandela dwarf anything he’s done thus far in his young Presidency.
He also accepted the PEACE prize one week after committing 30,000 additional U.S. troops to the war in Afghanistan. Awkward. But not really, because the President deals with the issue head-on in his much lauded speech in Oslo, Norway. He reminds his largely European audience that the non-violent movement would not have defeated Nazi Germany and that you can’t sit down at a table and negotiate with Al-Qaeda terrorists. He concludes sometimes you have to make war to find peace. Amazingly enough, the speech receives positive reviews from Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan and Sarah Palin. To underscore his point, the President later reminds attendees of the ceremonies that the founder of the Peace Prize, Alfred Noble, invented dynamite.
♦The Russians finally fess up. An amazing and slightly creepy light display over the skies of pre-dawn Norway on Wednesday were not the harbinger of an alien invasion. Turns out it was a Bulava missile test-fired by the Dmitry Donskoi submarine in the White Sea that failed spectacularly. What startled residents of Norway were seeing was the rocket spiraling down to earth through a haze of leaking fuel, resulting in an awesome and scary viewing experience. For the record, the Bulova missile is one of the most pathetic in the annals of modern rocketry. It has failed in 9 of 13 launch attempts. It occurred to me this would make a great pyrotechnic device for a truly memorable fireworks celebration. Until a friend pointed out that an exploding missile might hurt people. This confirms I would have made a horrible event planner.
♥ Tiger Woods’ attorneys go to court to pre-empt the publishing of nude pictures of the world’s greatest golfer/most questionable decision-maker.
Friday, 12/11/09
♦ The first reviews are in from pre-screenings of the new movie Avatar that is officially released a week from today. The epic, whose characters took 15 years to develop and whose total production and marketing costs exceed $350 million- is apparently pretty good. KTRA movie critic, Sam Rubin predicts at least three Oscars including a Best Picture nomination. That would be about $116 million per statue.
♦ It’s reported Democrats are poised to vote to increase the national debt ceiling by $1.8 trillion before the end of the year so they can get it out of the way and not have to vote to raise it again before the 2010 elections. What an outrage! Why you could produce and market 5,142 Avatar’s for that amount of money.
♥ The Sun newspaper reports exclusively that Tiger Woods tells his wife, Elin that he will do “anything” to keep their marriage together. She has reportedly agreed to do so for the sake of the children. Just one condition. He would be on the shortest leash in the history of leashes. No more golf tour unless Elin can come along and until the kids are old enough to tag along too. The first-born, Sam, is 2. The new kid, Charlie, is 10 months old. Looks like Tiger is going to be taking a few years off. Things should die down by then. Perhaps.
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Robert Garcia tweets at garciamedialife.
Finally- Some Common Sense Steps to Help Small Business
Last week, after the jobless summit at the White House, I held back on judging it a mere photo op: “We need to watch closely to see if anything comes of this over the next couple of months.” To give credit where credit is due, it only took about a week. Genuine concern about persistent unemployment and, let’s not kid ourselves, falling poll numbers, have resulted in a common sense blueprint to shift money from banks and Wall Street to the regular folks who actually power the economy. Wish it had been done sooner.
President Obama’s speech at the Brookings Institution Tuesday might have been a little defensive, but it also featured the prospect of some welcome relief and incentives for the nation’s small businesses that, after all, provide about two-thirds of the nation’s employment.
He proposes a tax cut for businesses that hire next year, would eliminate the capital gains tax on profits from small-business investments for a year and would get rid of fees on small-business loans along with federal guarantees of those loans through the end of 2010. Yes, yes and yes. This is precisely the kind of action that needs to be taken by the government to assist the private sector in creating real jobs.
Some of this will be paid for with $200 billion in bank bail-out funds the Treasury Department says are being paid back faster than expected. I like the irony. Greedy banks who continue their tight-fisted lending practices end up providing the cash they won’t loan out to small businesses.
The loyal opposition is, uh, loyally opposed. Republican lawmakers say it’s a violation of the agreement under which the Treasury Department was given the authority to run the bank bail-out fund. But the White House doesn’t need Congressional approval of this and has unilaterally extended the TARP program through October of next year to pay for the small business initiatives. In the end, I don’t see how folks who consistently argue on behalf of small business can oppose these measures with a clear conscience. Come next November, I have a feeling they won’t be bragging to their small business constituents that they opposed tax cuts for them.
At the moment, they’re arguing unused or returned TARP money has to be put specifically toward deficit reduction. May I point out that with the size of the red ink on the books right now, this is but a drop in a great big ocean. What we need now is jobs and I do believe people who get them- also pay taxes.
In his Brookings speech, the president reminded everyone once again that he inherited an economic basket case caused by Republican tax cut and spending policies that created the large deficits in the first place. Yes, true. But you are the President now, Mr. Obama. You wanted this job; you’ve got it- your falling poll numbers (down to 47% approval according to Gallup) indicate people expect you to fix whatever it was you inherited. Nice job coming up with some good ideas to create more hiring- no need to be whiney about it.
Garcia Media Life 
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