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Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category

Except it still seems a little weird having Atlas Shrugged updated to be set in modern times, and the characters don’t look much like my mental images. Reardon, to whom I most relate, comes closest.

I’m overdue for a reread, but with the film pending, I considered it recently and decided to put itoff.

I’ve been wanting to kick of my return to blogging here - but with posts of substance rather than the CotC stuff now elsewhere - with a post observing/opining that business blogging is not only not unusual or niche anymore, but that it’s rampant in this economy or lack thereof.

The boundaries between political and business/economics blogging has also blurred further. Again, the circumstances we are in make it inevitable. Government always affects the business and economic climate and activities, if seldom so negatively, and whether it ought to or not. That’s shown up in my selections for what now passes for CotC.

At any rate, it sometimes feels as if anything I can add or opine here would be superfluous, and perhaps there won’t be much or often, but the itch is getting more intense. Time to scratch it.

• #cotc Carnival of the Capitalists for 4/20/09: http://bizosphere.com/?p=167 #
• Not a post/article, but ExecTweets seems interesting: http://www.exectweets.com/ #
• Isn’t it always fun to blame Spitzer? http://tinyurl.com/dkw3wp #
• Party like it’s 1934: http://tinyurl.com/c8crw2 #
• Handling resume overload: http://blogs.bnet.com/bnet1/?p=1671 #
• Bandwidth Malthusians: http://tinyurl.com/chpla8 (Malthus lied, people thrived…) #
• 100 Free Useful Biz Courses/Lectures: http://tinyurl.com/cszy4u #
• Rob Sama Grand Plan - Taxation (Long, Cool): http://samablog.robsama.com/?p=4237 #
• Brief Atlas Shrugged review w/spoilers: http://andstillipersist.com/2009/04/atlas-shrugged-a-brief-review-wspoilers/ #
• Why is Venture Capital Under Assault? http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=325207949387991 #
• Pirate Bay http://voluntaryxchange.typepad.com/voluntaryxchange/2009/04/a-primer-on-pirate-bay-the-conviction-file-sharing-and-torrents.html #
• Review “Talent Is Overrated What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else” - Geoff Colvin http://bit.ly/fzyoV #
• The Box: http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2009/04/the-box.html #
• Death of the General: http://bit.ly/ziOxM #
• Less expensive yet more effective leadership development: http://bit.ly/9lu44 #
• Branding and Twitter: http://www.vipvirtualsolutions.com.au/2009/04/what-does-your-brand-say-about-you.html #
• Is Citigroup Vikram Pandit’s Job Safe? http://banksavingsreview.com/is-citigroup-vikram-pandits-job-safe/ #
• Rearranging bank deck chairs: http://wenchwisdom.blogspot.com/2009/04/using-our-own-money-against-us-part-4.html #
• Brain Map for executive time: http://smallbiztrends.com/2009/04/brain-map-executive-time.html #
• The Walmart Question: http://blog.mises.org/archives/009846.asp #
• Bank lending games? http://everydayfinance.blogspot.com/2009/04/refi-rates-low-but-banks-arent-lending.html #
• How to invest in Cuba: http://www.darwinsfinance.com/how-to-invest-in-cuba-does-obamas-cuba-deal-spell-gains/ #
• Risk Management: http://www.iqi-sm.com/blog/index.php/2009/04/23/strategy/how-to-develop-an-effective-business-risk-management-strategy/ #
• Understanding PPIP: http://wallandmain.wordpress.com/2009/04/19/understanding-the-ppip/ #
• Rob Sama Grand Plan on Housing: http://samablog.robsama.com/?p=4304 #
• Going Postal: http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=614 #
• That concludes this week’s entries. #
• Still looking for work, tech, maybe management, even blog-related. Resume PDF at http://bit.ly/5GxHh or LinkedIn at http://bit.ly/L8rkw. #
• Stay tuned for next week’s edition at http://bizosphere.com/, or read/follow http://twitter.com/CotC to catch them as they are tweeted. #

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• #cotc Carnival of the Capitalists for 3/30/09: http://bizosphere.com/?p=164 #
• Things to avoid in business plan: http://www.webatsimon.com/2009/03/things-to-avoid-when-preparing-a-business-plan.html #
• Warren’s First Ever Investment Advice: http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2009/03/my-first-ever-investment-advice.html #
• Are you shovel ready? http://www.timpeter.com/blog/2009/04/01/are-you-shovel-ready-5-tips-for-increasing-your-online-business-right-now/ #
• Tipping Point, where GDP=Debt: http://www.qando.net/?p=1847 #
• A Dangerous Trend? http://super-gas-saver.com/Save-Gas-Blog/2009/03/obama-forces-out-waggoner-at-gm-a-dangerous-trend-in-american-business/ #
• Comparing StockTwits vs Twiticker: http://bankling.com/2009/day-trader-tweets-stocktwits-vs-twiticker/ #
• Stupidity: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/business/economy/01leonhardt.html?_r=2&scp=2&sq=David%20Leonhardt&st=Search #
• Surprised, knowing volume is fine locally: http://memphis.bizjournals.com/memphis/stories/2009/03/30/daily52.html #
• Review of “The Expert’s Edge: Become the Go-to Authority People Turn to Every Time” by Ken Lizotte http://bit.ly/4d7cK0 #
• Mark to Market, but what of Intangibles? http://bit.ly/3TIgk0 #
• Great entry! The Planning Fairy: http://blog.threestarleadership.com/2009/03/30/the-planning-fairy.aspx #
• Most individual investors are poor portfolio managers: http://bit.ly/bHXmn #
• Four banks give back TARP http://banksavingsreview.com/four-banks-give-back-tarp-already/ #
• New SBA chief says the right thing: http://smallbiztrends.com/2009/04/new-chief-of-the-sba-says-the-right-thing.html #
• Feel like I missed stuff, but late, kids, need to call it a week and maybe get more next time. #
• Stay tuned for next week’s edition at http://bizosphere.com/, or read/follow http://twitter.com/CotC to catch them as they are tweeted. #

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Side note:
I’ve updated my resume (subject to ongoing change) and am still looking for work, more so now as my personal circumstances have changed. While I would prefer to remain within commuting distance of Middleboro, Massachusetts, I am slightly more open to sufficiently lucrative and interesting possibilities out of my area, as well as remaining open to some degree of working from home.

The resume doesn’t reflect Carnival of the Capitalists or blogging to speak of, but if you are seeing this, you have awareness of and might not be put off by that, or by the associated skills and experience being another path I could be presuaded along.

Here’s the PDF version.
Here’s the MS Word version.

Carnival of the Capitalists went on hiatus almost a year ago, and I had not really expected it to return, much as I often missed it. What a year to skip, too, on the topics of business and economics.

I’ve discussed restarting it, here and elsewhere, perhaps with a different official headquarters, but had not pursued it. Then I had an idea that reinvents it and enforces brevity in the time I devote to it.

I have been using Twitter heavily, substantially overlapping what I might otherwise emit via blogging, while going beyond it. Long ago I started a Twitter account for CotC, which mostly lay fallow as did CotC itself.

So… Each entry in a weekly edition of Carnival of the Capitalists will be a tweet in CotC on Twitter. A digest of those will publish here weekly via Twitter Tools, so you may see the collection as a single post at one time. You may also follow CotC from your Twitter account to see the component link entries as they happen, or you may check the CotC Twitter page to peruse them.

I figure a description and automatically shortened URL should not need more than 140 characters. Keeping it there, I can’t be verbose and the carnival won’t be an outrageous time sink. If I want to write longer posts aside from CotC, that’s my problem. I’d like to think you’ll see some appear here, once I get back into the groove.

And entering? You may e-mail the traditional way, thecotc@gmail.com, but you may also direct an @ reply on Twitter to @CotC followed by your link and an associated text. If you enter via Blog Carnival, it goes to the e-mail address, and you may find that convenient.

Topics? Haven’t changed. I would love to see a bit more on the philosophical side, and I expect entries to swirl around recent and current financial, economic and business events. This is the business and economics carnival. That’s a huge range. In general, all the old information on this site is obsolete or superceded, but relevant topics remain so.

You don’t have to be the author to submit. Blog posts are preferred, but especially good mainstream articles will be considered. Substantive and original are still preferred, but exceptions are not out of the question.

Submissions will not automatically be included, or included in the week that by rights they ought to have been in.

The weekly CotC post should publish Monday morning, automatically, ready or not, with whatever I have gotten into tweets during the week. The first will be Monday, January 12, 2009, and will be largely experimental, a beta if you will, since I have not tested the weekly digest function yet, and am a bit late announcing this.

Will it fly? I’d like to think it’s a good time for this sort of thing, done in a way that breaks with the past. I’d like to think that adding Twitter to the mix will expand the audience and generate some excitement.

Here goes…

Via Rob Sama, who came out as Rubinomics (I was torn and might have had I gone with my other response), this is a fun economic profile test.

I came out as moderate supply side economics, which means:

Supply Side Economics holds that capital accumulation drives growth, and that the most important role for government is to remove disincentives to capital formation, especially by reducing taxes on capital and earnings. It holds that markets generally get it right, and that government intervention should be limited, including through a simple tax code with low rates and few deductions. But markets only get it right if they get the right price signals, so supply-side economics focuses on making sure that there are as few distortions to the market as possible. Finally, the overriding goal of supply-side economics growth; equity issues are best left to the market.

I’m not sure I liked the way the answers boxed me in, but its point was to match you with one of a small set of types, so what the heck.

Around these parts, this articlle sounds funny. Some of us have been driving less for a long time. To the point where atrophied vehicles are a concern, where they can just sit and decay by not being driven as intended.

Well, that’s not what the article title says: May Retail Sales Up More Than Expected.

Rebate checks? More money on hand? Do the people who write these things actually do any shopping?

I could easily buy retail prices being up by the 0.8% stated, after factoring out certain big ticket items and gas. There’s just no factoring out the cost of fuel from the cost of groceries and other goods.

Painting this as rosy sales news is almost like thinking that the same percentage profit on $138 that you made on $50 is a “windfall.”

Keith Casey applies The Broken Window Fallacy in Software. Perhaps I’ll but this over at Geek Practitioners too, for its tech angle, but ultimately it’s the same business and economics issue people are too often mistaken about, whatever the exact circumstances.

I have an accumulation of links, some of which I may have dumpled elsewhere and forgotten, which I am trying to go through and link in brief on whatever blogs seem most relevant. Thus you can expect to see an especially large burst, but I will also endeavor to put more links as I find them.

In going back through old business and economics posts I’ve written elsewhere, I noticed regular assertions i made that we were in a housing bubble, and links to other people on the topic. It might be interesting to compile them, in retrospect, especially given the latest assertions by some that there is or was no bubble, or certainly not one of significance.

We had to fend off people trying to drumbeat us into buying a house we couldn’t possibly have afforded, at or near the obvious top of the market, which would have been done through dubious financing for which we should have qualified if we’d applied, even without most of the debt we carry. That fact alone screamed bubble and overextension.

Retrospectives to come, as I get to it.