(Conceived By Someone Who Never Worked in a Real Job, May 02, 2009)
Financial Armageddon has long highlighted the disconnect between Main Street and Wall Street. Even now, after an extraordinary number of banks and brokers have failed or are still being bailed out, and thousands of financial industry workers have lost their jobs (excluding those at the top, who should have been the first to go) or had bonuses and salaries slashed, there are still plenty of clueless « experts » running around – including those who have the power to invest other people’s money – who claim to see all manner of « green shoots » sprouting up throughout the economy … (Homepage 1/2).
New York Hard Assets Investment Conference, New York Marriott, May 11-12, 2009: Brochure; Other Events; Venue; Contact Events Team; No Surprise at All (Except to Wall Street);
Economic blackmail? Experts? Careening Towards a Crisis; A Shift in Spending Behavior;
National Debt Clock Counter, Blogroll, Mainstream Media, Alternative Media, Other Resources, Archive, Newsletter, and many more: all that in the right column;
Contact.
Homepage 2/2:
… While I could be wrong when it comes to my admittedly pessimistic views about where the bottom is (and when we might reach that point), even a cursory glance at what is happening around the country makes me feel reasonably confident that we aren’t there yet. To cite just one example, I refer to the following post from Clusterstock, entitled About That GDP Inventory Decline … .
An executive who works for a massive global industrial company observes that the much-celebrated decline in inventories in the GDP numbers should not be taken as a sign that GDP is suddenly about to start accelerating:
I watched with some amusement as analysts decided that reduced Inventories in the GDP data boded well for future GDP figures. While, all else equal, certainly lower would be better, the fact is we are slashing inventories (and trying to do so even more) because there are no orders. None. We do take « orders » (non-binding, no cash down payment) which are what is optimistically shared with the Street but binding orders with cash down payments do not exist today, haven’t for over 8 months now. When one lands it is company news and because a government entity somewhere backed it. And trust me, if we aren’t getting orders neither are the next 5 guys.
I suppose either the analysts – and the market, which has been juicing our stock (thanks for that) – are correct and the orders are about to start rolling in, or they are going to be somewhat disappointed later this year when our backlog starts to run dry. I hope they’re right. But I assure you the absolute last thing that’s going to happen is for us to start *growing* inventories without the orders – that strategy can only possibly be conceived in a cubicle somewhere, occupied by someone that never worked in a real job. [MP here: don’t you just love that last bit?].