Either way, I’m signing up to get my piece of the action. There aren’t many places outside of Vegas where you can turn $50 into $150 without really doing anything.
Some interesting reporting out of The O the other day. Turns out when Umpqua Bank came in and “took over” Bank of Clark County a few months back, they only took the deposits. They left the loans with the FDIC. The result has meant layoffs for local businesses who’s lines of credit have been recinded by the FDIC.
Smart move by Umpqua, I suppose. They get lots of cash to help out their iffy balance sheet, and assume zero of BoCC’s risk. And what is Umpqua doing with their money? They’ve promoted a “LEED accredited loan specialist” to their new position of eco-banking manager. Uh huh. So they’re prepared to loan out money to various “sustainable projects” which may or may not be economically viable, but not to local businesses who’ve been around for years and have a solid record of paying loans back.
I don’t get this at all. Umpqua took on over $200 million in TARP funds in late-2008 and they’re getting ready to send it back out the door so we can build eco-roofs and bike racks while local business, for which the TARP was created in part to save, chokes to death. What a country.
I know I swore I wouldn’t do this anymore, but whatever. A post at TPM got me to thinking. Talking about the state of the auto industry, a veteran of the wars made a couple of fascinating observations.
I was meeting a friend in the GM building in downtown Detroit about 18 months ago and was astounded to learn how few people there were actually involved in making cars and how many were involved with other GM business interests.
GM got out of the car business long ago. Oh sure, they still make cars. But is that their business? Heck no. For the last two decades GM’s business has been buying dollar bills for a buck and selling them for a buck-fifteen. That’s what GMAC was all about. Cars, if you’ll pardon the pun, were just one vehicle toward that 15% or more they were making. It didn’t matter whether they were quality or not, only that they were financed. They were also heavily into real estate and credit cards.
Their problem isn’t so much that no one wants their cars. It’s that no one is willing to pay such exorbitant prices for money anymore. Mitt Romney can stomp up and down all he wants about how the unions killed GM. It isn’t so. It was the money men.
The guy continues:
In Chrysler’s case, this was a weak company driven into the ground and thoroughly looted by it’s “merger” with Daimler-Benz. It was funny going to hotels around the Chrysler headquarters in Auburn Hills and thinking you were in Germany due to the huge number of German speaking guests. Each staying for long periods of time on the company dime and all being charged to Chrysler.
Aha! Suddenly those frequent Lufthansa flights between PDX and Frankfurt make a whole lotta sense. Are they really about boosting our local economy? Or are they about corporate big wigs coming out here and bleeding a once proud local company dry? I think we know the answer.
The more I think about it, the more I think Obama needs to just cut the auto makers loose. It’s over.
It’s far worse than I’d heard. I saw this bit earlier today and wondered what it was about. What could Cramer have possibly said that would lead the CEO of The Street.com to quit. Starting about 8 minutes in, we get our answer. Stewart’s line “I want the Jim Cramer I see on CNBC to protect me from that Jim Cramer” was devistating. There should be more resignations after this.
Of course there won’t be.
Comedy Central posted the whole unedited thing in three parts here, here, and here. It’s required viewing this weekend for anyone who has even one dollar in a 401k, mutual fund, or pension.
…why do Detroit Three’s cars sell for $2,000 less than comparable Japanese models? This is the key issue–not labor costs, which including the legacy costs account for less than 10 percent of the cost of a car.
Exactly. If I could buy an American car that was as reliable as my Honda, I probably would. However, I cannot. American car makers have had an entire generation now to figure out how to beat the Japanese in the car business. For whatever reason, they’ve chosen not to.
For the first time tonight, The Simpsons will be doing their thing in HD. I won’t be participating in hi-definition because I have yet to take the leap.
A friend of mine called yesterday to let me know she had a tax refund burning a hole in her pocket and she was on the hunt for a new TV. She gratefully accepted my request to come tag along. There’s nothing I love more than the hunt for technology.
We met up at the Circuit City around 3. We waded through boxes and half broken down display racks as we tried to find a deal on a TV. There were none to be found. Just a lot of signs with the “original” price crossed out and the “new” price scribbled in. Evidently they don’t fear being able to liquidate their TV stock, because those “blow-out” prices were more than the regular price down the road at Fry’s. Where they do have deals though is on video games, cds, and dvds. Also if you’re in the market for a new computer, you might want to stop in. They had a couple of nice machines in there priced to move.
We headed over to Video Only to see what they had. I’d been in there a time or two and had been completely unimpressed by their service. They’re commissioned and it shows. So it came as kind of a shock yesterday when our salesman chose to leave us alone when we asked. Freaking weird. He also got a pretty good chuckle when I asked where the restroom was because my “brother”, my friend’s five-year-old son, had to go. Yes, good times.
We found two units that caught our eye. The first was a 42″ 720p LCD for $750. The other a 42″ 1080p LCD for $850. As we took the prices down, the salesman came over to ask what his competition was. We were honest and told him we’d just started. As we headed toward the door, he asked us to give him the last shot. We promised we would.
After that came the Best Buy. They moved the store out of a strip mall up near I5 and 79th street and down south of the border a few months ago. They moved it into the old Comp USA that was there. Because of that, it feels a little dark and cramped.
As we started walking through their display, we were decended upon by a salesguy who no matter how many times we said we were just browsing wouldn’t walk away. He kept pestering us with questions about what we were looking for, asking whether we knew the difference between 720p and 1080p, and what price point we were looking at. All good questions, Isuppose, but I’m not there to get educated. And I’m also not there to get badgered. The guy had obviously read his sales manuals. “Get the customer to talk”. “Keep asking questions”. I finally cut him off and we made our way toward the door. That’s the only way to deal with the salesguy who won’t stop talking and let me come up with my own questions.
My friend thought she’d done something wrong, but I explained that I’d just had enough of the salesguy. Fair enough, she said.
Our last stop was Target. They don’t have many models, but the ones they have are pretty cheap. They had two brand name 42″ 1080p models for $799. That was all the ammunition we needed for our return to Video Only.
Before we stepped back in, I went over our plan. I asked my friend if she was willing to walk out the door over the $50 we were about to ask for. She told me as long as I did the talking for her, she’d stand by whatever decision I made.
As we walked back in the door, our salesguy friend was there to greet us. I told him what we’d found. He put up a token argument about how we were comparing cheap Chinese products to higher quality Korean products. I reminded him we were just talking about $50. He asked for a minute and went to find his manager.
Another couple watched us as we stood cooling our heels. They had their eye on the same set and were curious what the result would be. After a minute or two, our guy came back with his manager. All I heard from the manager was “I’ll approve it” and just like that we got our TV for $799. The salesguy immediately walked over to the other couple and offered them the same deal which they took. Everybody won. What a great day.
Chuck Schumer thinks we might be looking at $3 to $4 trillion dollars before it’s all said and done. But how is this any different than what we were first sold? The TARP, as it was originally envisioned, anticipated this. The government was going to use the $750 billion like a credit card. They would go in, buy up the first chunk of assets, fix them, sell them off, then, with the balance paid off, go back in and start the process again. At any one time, there would be $750 billion on the books. It obviously didn’t work out that way.
There’s no way we can go in and take the entire $4 trillion off the books at once, is there? No. It’s time we do what we did 20 years ago. Wipe out the shareholders, clean up the books, and sell off the institutions.
Prior to the Act, each bank was required to execute a collateral agreement with each public treasurer having a bank account. To guarantee against loss, the bank, after allowance for Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance, was required to place securities in escrow having a value equal to one hundred and ten percent of each public treasurer’s bank account balance.
With the passage of the 1969 legislation, the requirement that each bank must guarantee each public depositor against any loss was eliminated and a new concept − mutuality of responsibility − was adopted. This means that in the event of default of one bank, all participating banks in the state of Washington will collectively assure that no loss of funds will be suffered by any public treasurer or custodian of public funds.
I wonder how other member banks protect themselves against this stuff. Remember it’s collateralized debt obligations and their friends credit default swaps that are largely responsible for getting us into our current mess. This would seem to be a prime situation where a bank would seek to enter into a credit default swap, no? Banks across the state have to have insured themselves against this sort of thing, thus eliminating any adverse activity on their balance sheet. So someone, somewhere is now forced to reach into the rabbit hole and pull out over $38 million (Vancouver’s $8 million plus another $30 million in other public money). Want to guess where that will come from?
It would seem we may wish to revisit this and go back to the 110% rule. It seems much safer and ultimately cheaper for everyone.
If the bridge can symbolize the best and greenest thinking of our region, that would be a fine thing, too. And some brainstorming along this line has begun. One architect, for instance, recently proposed wind turbines on the bridge, possibly to power tollbooths or bridge lights — an intriguing idea.But would it be timeless enough? Any too-faddish design could be as instantly obsolete as Disneyland’s Tomorrowland was, from the minute it opened.
Bingo. Saddling future generations with technology like wind turbines or solar panels, both of which will surely be outdated early in the bridge’s lifetime, is no way to go. The current bridge is a product of a by-gone era that couldn’t have possibly forseen the Interstate Highway System and we’ve been dealing with that problem for over a half century.
A new crossing needs to be utilitarian, period. We’re not building it for today. We’re building it for the year 2090. Let’s make sure it will still be functional then.
