Thursday Feb 18 2010
From October 1972 thru April 1973 I was in a training school at a Ross Perot owned company, DuPont Glore Forgan. We were on Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles, we strolled by the original Brown Derby on the way to class and trolled Marina Del Ray on the weekend, heady stuff for a kid from Kermit, TX. Perot washed out at least half the applicants in his Dallas TX interviews, yes one had to fly to Dallas to pass muster to be admitted to LA. Once there our original 42 dwindled to 25 by graduation. I guess I was a little hard on one chap in our role playing one Wednesday, the object of my derision was gone the next day. I am told it replicated a Officer Training Class from the military and we had quite a few ex military in our group. There was a lot of good content there. One of their favorite aphorisms was
the formula for success is totally known.
True enough. What does that mean? It means that whatever you want to accomplish, the same basic formula holds true. You must immerse yourself in study and preparation, you must engage in repetition until the difficult becomes routine, you must study the canvas so to speak until the big picture becomes clear, as Mike Phelps Swim Coach observed, you must get in the water.
The Weird Four Year Games are being televised, that of course is the Winter Olympics What could be more weird than say the Luge or the gravity defying Snowboard in U shaped pipeline, or the, Betcha I can still be standing up at the bottom otherwise known as Downhill….whether one should devote one's life to those pursuits I cannot say, but as with anything, for sure those folks spend lots of time working on those pursuits. I noted the women's downhill was won by a couple of seconds and that is out of a time of one and and a half minutes, close stuff. One can observe that the best in the world are falling down the hill or out of the speed skating circle, this is competition on the edge, literally.
At any rate, ours is a less physical though still mentally challenging pursuit. What numbers do we pour into any one time period otherwise known as accounting?
I start my day early, I was up before 7 AM going over the links I have provided on the the sidebar.
Today, Jesse observes that most of the stock market gains are at night and on thin volume, clearly some group is attempting to boost stock levels,
Mish quotes Pew study showing the underfunding of pension obligations, note that is a chapter in Intermed Accounting and a long term liability no one is owning up to
Mark Steyn notes the favorability ratings of the Administration continue to fall, has no one noticed that Obama now is on the same track as Bush, the public is very unhappy with the inability of Washington DC to deliver any results other than for Washington DC, it does not matter which party is in, this is the result and the mantel the President will wear until the public mood changes, hello socionomics, only months ago the voters threw out Republicans, yesterday Dem Senator van Bayh took his $14 M in campaign funds into retirement, now voters are throwing Dems out in Virginia, New Jersey, and Mass, yet the political talking heads miss the point, the voters are angry with the status quo, period
Business Insider notes the slide in the Euro, has all this about Greece been overdone or is the Aegean peninsula a tipping point?
Meanwhile Iran is clearly planning nuclear ambitions which would change the entire Mid East equation, and remember they have most of the oil….
Here is Mish's summary of where we are, the reason this is important is that the economy is more likely to get worse before things get better, we have underfunded pensions, underfunded unemployment funds, and underfunded budgets in state and local governments. The support for these governments, business , is laying off not hiring people,yet the governments have not either cut salaries or laid anyone off. Raising taxes to fund the underfunded will only take away from what is left of the productive sector, ie, money spent on debt interest is hardly building the infrastructure. This will not work. You will be graduating into the most difficult economic situation since 1974. Those are the facts, all I can do is urge you to be prepared, like the Downhill, the difference between victory and gosh the trip to Vancouver was fun, will be measured in seconds.
Let's put this in perspective. How many people are enrolled as accounting majors in San Antonio? Answer, well over one thousand, whoops better add Texas State all the schools between here and Brownsville, make that over three thousand. How many jobs openings will there be next year, read below before answering. Trust me, the people that will get hired are 'in the accounting water.'
Fundamental Thesis
The odds of another huge stock market dip in 2010 or 2011 are huge. The odds of another recession in the next 10 years are also huge. Heck, the odds of double-dip recession in 2010 or 2011 are very substantial.
Fundamentally, a huge wave of boomer retirement is coming up, and those retirees will be drawing down funds and lowering lifestyles, not contributing and consuming more. Moreover, global wage arbitrage still has not played out and there is huge downward pressure on wages and jobs.
Credit card defaults are still soaring, and banks are still sitting in hundreds of billions of dollars worth of assets held off the balance sheet. The S&P PE is over 20, a number associated with market tops, not bottoms.
Structurally, unemployment will remain high for a decade. And finally, consumer attitudes towards debt and risk have reached a secular peak and have turned.
That is not a backdrop for a huge bull market in equities or a massive bet on inflation either.
Pension plans better figure this out and act accordingly or they are going to dig themselves an even deeper hole.
States better wise up and kill defined benefit plans before they go bankrupt and/or start a massive taxpayer revolt. There is no other way out.
Professor Elam 