Really good interview. Go read the whole thing.
Month: November 2010
Foreclosuregate
The thing that no one seems to mention is that Wall Street bankers and mortgage companies, confronted with a record number of transactions to go with those record profits, never even considered simply hiring enough people to actually handle the paperwork.
Funny, huh.
Tom Toles
There is no “rest of the trick.”
Hallelujah
First of all, you need to understand that to a Philadelphian, the old John Wanamaker’s department store (now Macy’s) was a magical place. It was so big, it even had its own post office and travel agency, and just about anyone who’s grown up here has, at one time or another, told their friends to “meet me at the eagle” — the brass sculpture in the Grand Court.
And Wanamaker’s at Christmas? Even better. If you were lucky, Mom took you there to see Santa — and to ride the ceiling monorail that circled the massive toy department. If you were even luckier, she took you to lunch after in the Crystal Tea Room, where we dined with silver flatware and cloth napkins, under huge crystal chandeliers.
Then it was down to the Grand Court, where we’d get to watch the Christmas light show that featured the largest pipe organ in the world and a gigantic tree with changing colored lights and dancing fountains. It was advertised as “The Tree Of A Million Lights” and maybe it was.
All I know is, it was dazzling. We’d throw our coats down on the marble floors and lie down so we could look up, transfixed. My parents took me to see it, I took my kids, and my siblings take their grandchildren. It’s one of the few remaining grand traditions in an age where there aren’t many left.
So when the Philadelphia Opera Company staged that recent “Hallelujah” flash mob, they couldn’t have picked a better spot than the old Wanamaker’s Grand Court.
Every city had its Christmas tradition. What were yours?
Wake up
Rage Against The Machine:
Pushing back
DUBLIN — After a week that brought Ireland a pledge of a $114 billion international rescue package and the toughest austerity program of any country in Europe, thousands of demonstrators took to Dublin’s streets on Saturday to protest wide cuts in the country’s welfare programs and in public-sector jobs.
The protests centered on a milelong march along the banks of the River Liffey in central Dublin to the General Post Office building on O’Connell Street, site of the battle between Irish republican rebels and British troops in the Easter Uprising in 1916 — an iconic event that many in Ireland regard as the tipping point in Ireland’s long struggle for independence.
The choice of venue for the protests by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, coordinating the march through the city, reflected the mood of anger, dismay and recrimination in the wake of the economic shocks of the past 10 days. Those shocks have been the culmination of two years in which the Irish economy has shrunk by about 15 percent, faster than any other European economy.
Before that, Ireland enjoyed more than a decade of unprecedented prosperity, so the rescue package being worked out by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union and the austerity program the Dublin government has been forced to adopt to secure the bailout loans have come as a deep jolt.
Among other things, the austerity package will involve the loss of about 25,000 public-sector jobs, equivalent to 10 percent of the government work force, as well as a four-year, $20 billion program of tax increases and spending cuts like sharp reductions in state pensions and the minimum wage. One Dublin newspaper, the Irish Independent, estimated that the cost of the measures for a typical middle-class family earning $67,000 a year would be about $5,800 a year.
The ensuing political turmoil has raised questions about the ability of the government of Prime Minister Brian Cowell to secure backing for the austerity package when it is presented to Parliament on Dec. 7. The coalition government was weakened last week by a split between the Fianna Fail party, which Mr. Cowen leads, and its main coalition partner, the Green Party, and a stunning loss by Fianna Fail in an election Friday for a parliamentary seat that reduced the government majority to two.
Terror
Time to pat down everyone watching Christmas tree lightings!
Rainbow connection
Jason Mraz:
There’s your trouble
One of my favorite Dixie Chick songs:
High profits, no jobs
They really have a nice little capitalist system, don’t they? Glad that’s working out for them!
Not far from where Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke grew up, a revolution inside a Campbell Soup Co. plant explains why U.S. corporations are piling up profits — with little need to hire more people.
Workers such as “Big John” Filmore, a 28-year Campbell veteran, huddle every day with management in situation rooms before their shifts to find ways to save money for the company. Rising productivity is helping boost profit margins here in Maxton, North Carolina, where 858 workers turn out a billion meals a year, and at most of the 243 non-financial companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index with rising profit margins.
Companies slashed 8.5 million jobs during the worst recession since the Great Depression, while also slowing capital investment plans. Campbell, the world’s largest soup maker, DuPont Co., the third-biggest U.S. chemical maker, and United Parcel Service Inc., the world’s largest package-delivery business, are asking workers to help save cash by working smarter with existing technology. A potential cost: Efficiency gains reduce the chances recession-casualty jobs will come back.
“When the productivity growth comes, then watch out because that is when companies start not needing so much labor,” Edmund Phelps, a Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate, said in an interview.
Some 142 non-financial companies in the S&P 500 had improvements in operating margins of three percentage points or more from the final three months of 2007, when the previous expansion peaked, compared with the most recent quarter, according to data compiled by Bloomberg as of yesterday.