tofu wrote:The Economist felt it was leading to misleading inflation numbers and I have to say as both a consumer and investment banker I think they are right. Also most people don't know that we now have this "fudge" factor in the inflation number.
It used to be that government numbers actually gave an indicator of something useful. Not only does the CPI not include housing, the GDP includes real-estate sales in its value!
Maybe as an investment banker, you consider real estate appreciation a valid component of our domestic "product", but it seems a little fishy to me.
tofu wrote:The Economist felt it was leading to misleading inflation numbers and I have to say as both a consumer and investment banker I think they are right. Also most people don't know that we now have this "fudge" factor in the inflation number.
It used to be that government numbers actually gave an indicator of something useful. Not only does the CPI not include housing, the GDP includes real-estate sales in its value!
Maybe as an investment banker, you consider real estate appreciation a valid component of our domestic "product", but it seems a little fishy to me.
No Chuck I sure don't consider it part of GDP and I am very uncomfortable with the fact that we are losing so much of our manufacturing sector. It seems like there is no shortages of "experts" who try to convince us that this is not only not a problem - but actually good for us. This constant tampering with government statistical indicators is in many ways an attempt to massage the numbers so that we don't think we're actually suffering a negative effect of the loss of our manufacturing sector. I'm certainly not an isolationist or believer in tariffs etc. and you can not blame business for moving to overseas locations because of cost advantages to protect shareholders etc.
I lay the blame on the back of government policies that are for all intent and purpose hostile to manufacturers. You have agencies such as OSHA which have administative judges who not only enforce the law they actually can make law. They are the only judges who can actually make law. I don't want to imply that OSHA does not do positive things, but they have done things to great harm to some industries/companies that anybody with common sense would just cringe at.
Layer on the "corporate ambulance chasers" who again are pretty much just giant parasites who exist to suck the life blood out of business both big and small. The balance seems to be completely out of wack with these guys able to shop cases to plantiff friendly jurisdictions and with many folks not wanting to serve on jurys (resulting in dumbed down jury pools) coupled with long drawn out complicated business case trials and you get jurys that come up with crazy decisions with ridiculous punitive damages.
I'm amazed how even sophisticated folks don't understand how a profit or loss comes about and that just because you are a corporation doesn't mean you have some vast pile of money to hand out. There seems to be a disconnect in the notion that public corp. are own by private shareholders/citizens and taking money from the corp. is in effect taking money from your neighbor or yourself if you are a shareholder.
My favorite is when shareholders sue their own company which is in effect like suing yourself. Can you imagine being happy by suing yourself and winning a large judgement. You now take the money out of your left hand - deduct 40% for the lawyers - and put the remaining 60% in your right hand. Getting 60 cents back on the dollar.
I could probably fill up a couple of threads with ranting about what's happened to the high-tech sector and how the effects are rippling down through our educational system.
But, as an investment banker, you probably pay attention to where venture capital is going.
Every year, one of my engineering trade rags publishes a list of electronics industry startups, who's backing them, and what the mission is. This past year, it seemed as if about a third of them involved setting up design facilities in India or Russia and manufacturing in China. Of the remaining ones doing some design work in the US, I suspect that a fair amount of the employment will be via H1-B visas (why bother with paying a fair wage when you have what amounts to an indentured worker?).
The result is pretty predictable. Engineering enrollment in our universities has plummeted from a decade ago; R&D industry grants to those same univeristies are drying up. I suppose that most new enrollment is in business and law.
So when easy money policies fail to keep the economy afloat (don't get me started on the catastrophe that interest-only mortgages will turn out to be), what are we going to do?
Chuck(G) wrote:I could probably fill up a couple of threads with ranting about what's happened to the high-tech sector ...
Anyone following this case will realize the absolute stupidity of the lawsuit. In a nutshell, a lawyer under the guise of bogus company NTP is trying to make money off a dead guy's patent; when neither have ever actually made anything. Meanwhile, they are trying to cripple one of the most creative and useful tech inventions to come along in recent years, that is crucial to both business and government. Assuming NTP eventually wins, the only one to benefit will be a lawyer; everyone else will loose.
Marty "who will file a patent on conical brass tubes 18 feet long so everyone will have to cut their tubas to CC or pay me" Neilan
What I noticed when everyone was complaining about gas prices after Katrina, was that the mantra was everyone should drive less. Of course most people didn't listen. OK, we're addicted to cars and driving any/everywhere. I did not hear a peep about, OK, I can't drive less, so maybe I could alter my driving style to save gas instead. I still see/saw lots of people doing jack rabbit starts (often followed by jack rabbit stops at the next light). I my opinion they have no right too complain. If you are not willing to make any changes, keep your mouth shut (unless you are already taking steps to really, reduce consumption).
I'd like to see the instanteous gas mileage indicators that I hear some hybrids have, put into all new cars. Maybe that would change the way people drive, if they could see their mileage drop as they take off. This might even work as a better deterent, if rather than mpg, it gave you the cost per mile (or maybe an average for 5-10 miles) using automatically updated prices beemed out by gas stations (who would also tell your their price per gallon)
I agree with Bloke, we've shown the gas companies that we are still willing to pay even more.
My first thought when prices jumped after Katrina was, dang, we should have put the $0.50 gas tax on all those years ago, as people still would have bought gas. Sure, they would have complained loudly, but they'd have kept right on driving and paying.
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