Funny Thoughts on Jobs Leaving America

Tom Smith started the day early having set his
alarm clock




(MADE IN JAPAN ) for 6am.


While his coffeepot



(MADE IN CHINA )



was perking, he shaved with his



electric razor



(MADE IN HONG KONG ).




He put on a



dress shirt



(MADE IN SRI LANKA ),




designer jeans



(MADE IN SINGAPORE )



and



tennis shoes



(MADE IN KOREA )



After cooking his breakfast in his new



electric skillet



(MADE IN INDIA )




he sat down with his



calculator



(MADE IN MEXICO )



to see how much he could spend today. After setting his



watch



(MADE IN TAIWAN )




to the radio



(MADE IN INDIA )



he got in his car



(MADE IN GERMANY )



filled it with GAS



(from Saudi Arabia )



and continued his search



for a good paying AMERICAN JOB.



At the end



of yet another discouraging



and fruitless day




checking his

Computer

(Made In Malaysia ),



Joe decided to relax for a while.



He put on his



sandals

(MADE IN BRAZIL )




poured himself a glass of



wine

(MADE IN FRANCE )



and turned on his



TV



(MADE IN INDONESIA ),


and then wondered



why he can't find



a good paying job



in AMERICA

Karl Denninger on the Economy - Dec 7, 2008

In 1996 when I first moved to Chicago I was advised by several people that the best Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Chicago was MCSNet. Their CEO Karl Denninger had put together quite a well-run business. I'm guessing that Denninger would've stayed on in the IT industry if it hadn't been for the dotCOM bubble pushing him into cashing out. Now he's independently wealthy and spends most of his days/nights monitoring the global financial markets. I've been reading his BLOG for nearly 20 months now since the stresses felt during the last half of 2006 in the subprime mortgage market caused a lot of firms entrenched in this market to blow up in early 2007. Denninger definitely saw the recession coming and he tried hard to warn the politicians early on about what was coming.

President-Elect Barak Obama at http://change.gov/page/s/yourstory is now requesting that Americans share their experience and ideas on what they'd like the Obama administration to do and where they'd like the country to go. Karl Denninger has put together his ideas at http://market-ticker.org/archives/676-To-Obamas-Transition-Team.html to address this. The image I borrowed from Denninger showing the relationship between debt levels, year and recessions/depressions tell a lot. A recession/depression will continue to get worse as long as debt levels keep rising. Recoveries begin when bad debt gets wiped off the books with clean new starts through bankruptcy.

However the current policies of the Congress/President are likely just worsening the problem as they are encouraging/promoting greater debt burdens. We've all see what a failure the stimulus packages done this year have been. Instead of promoting cleanup/recovery they've been throwing more debt at the problem. As a result the debt levels are still rising. We already have proven programs in place that clean up bad debts. Its called foreclosure, repossession and bankruptcy. Its the way of turning over control of assets/operations under sick management to the management of the creditors and in turn allowing the sick companies to stop spreading their cancer and for sick consumers to get a fresh start. Families and corporations with clean balance sheets are vibrant/progressive and thus help the economy grow.

The only ones who really win through bailouts are special interests that figure out how to fleece/milk the system. That's what has been happening with the 800 billion earmark for Fannie/Freddie and the 700 billion dollar bailout the past few months. And that's what will probably happen with the auto industry bailout, Citigroup bailout and others that are either in progress or being decided upon. The best chance for recovery are to see debt disappear. I hope someday that Congress will decide to start serving the American people instead of the special interests who are lining their pockets.

25 million surplus cars in America

The real reason why Detroit is in BIG trouble.
There are simply too many cars in America.
We either need to get rid of some old cars, or
we can increase the number of drivers.

My Melbourne Relatives

I do believe that my dad's sister Cami and her husband Bill have certainly lived lives and raised children that are geared towards making a difference in the world.

Their son Tim is Director of a research lab that's leading the field in seismology/techtonics. See http://www.geodesy.org/index.html?page=http%3A//www.geodesy.org/tilt/explanation_ETS.html for more. Tim got his PhD from CalTech and has been a Fulbright scholar and his permanent position is as a professor of geology at Central Washington University.

While Tim has watched the earth shake their daughter Ruthann has seen a shakedown occur in the banking industry. She was the Chief Risk Officer at IndyMac Bancorp that failed earlier this year. As the housing bubble from earlier this decade has deflated its brought down many businesses. And seeing what Ruthann and others have watched its obvious that nothing can ever be taken for granted on this planet of ours. For example, a November 23rd article in the Detroit Free Press includes the following:

The lending industry seconded Reich's concerns at the time, arguing that the government was needlessly depriving families of a chance at homeownership. IndyMac argued in a letter to regulators that in evaluating loan applications it was not fair to rule out the possibility that a prospective borrower's income might increase. "Lenders risk denying home ownership to qualified borrowers," chief risk officer Ruthann Melbourne wrote.

An article today by the Associated Press says the following:

One of the most contested rules said that before banks purchase mortgages from brokers, they should verify the process to ensure buyers could afford their homes. Some bankers now blame much of the housing crisis on brokers who wrote fraudulent, predatory loans. But in 2006, banks said they shouldn't have to double-check the brokers. "It is not our role to be the regulator for the third-party lenders," wrote Ruthann Melbourne, chief risk officer of IndyMac Bank. California-based IndyMac also criticized regulators for not recognizing the track record of interest-only loans and option ARMs, which accounted for 70 percent of IndyMac's 2005 mortgage portfolio.

My own opinion is that the mortgage banking industry overlooked one key factor in their models ..... home prices might go down. And why they overlooked this factor is because (a) home prices on a nationwide basis hadn't ever fallen since the Great Depression, (b) conventional thinking that government safeguards and the internationalization of global markets would prevent another Great Depression from causing home prices to fall, (c) data-driven modeling that didn't include sufficient data to model for the "what if home prices fall" scenario, (d) modeling on historical data for new creative mortgage products that hadn't been in existence very long, (e) the importance of market pricing in modeling which allows underwriters to offload much of the risk to the marketplace. For the articles highlighting Ruthann's comments please see http://freeinternetpress.com/story.php?sid=19241 and http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hTDPY8hFtJLxsv8i1Q7OvoRrlYrQD94PQ0JO0

I think that if anyone is going to figure out the modeling for asset-backed assets going forward it'll be Ruthann. She only got a Master's from CalTech and PhD in Math from the University of Wisconsin because she's got the brains to figure things like this out. And Ruthann's husband Adam Steltzner is certainly doing well in his field. He works at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, California 25-member team responsible for the landing phase of the Mars Rover missions. See http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/04/science/sci-giantrover4 for more on this.

Tim's wife Anne is accomplished herself. See http://www.cwu.edu/~chem/faculty/johansen for more on her position as a Chemistry professor at CWU.