You Need Cash?
I’ve come to a conclusion - any company that is ready to give you “CASH!” for anything is a scam on one level or another. I’ve given this some (probably too much) deep thought - in this day and age, why is “CASH!” such a motivating factor? Whether it be wedding rings you have laying around the house or the actual house itself, who gives a rat’s ass if it is actual paper bills or a check? Unless you are paranoid about receiving a check from the company, which probably means you shouldn’t be dealing with that company in the first place. Next time you find yourself curious about a commercial that features “CASH!” as primary motivation, think of this exchange:
“Hey, you want $100 for your car?”
“Hell no - it has at least that much gas in it.”
“How about if I offer you…CASH!?” while waving around 50 two-dollar bills.
“Please die now.”
I guess this goes at least as far back as the glory days of the pawn shop. The dusty, poorly-lit establishments where desperate souls would sell anything valuable and/or of a questionable background - for “CASH!” I have only been in a pawn shop once, and the prices did not impress. Some of the old crap was cool - classic video games and old electronics. I also remember thinking that when individuals need “CASH!” to either get their husband out of jail or save their thumbs from Guido, guns and bowling balls are always the first in hock.
I’m thinking of trying that in less traditional situations. Ebay doesn’t offer a separate “Buy it now - in CASH!” option I can use as a seller. But when a company is truly desperate? I wonder how much “CASH!” they’ll take for General Motors?
Peter Schiff Called It.
Watch and relish in how this guy was all but totally dismissed by people. I love it when experts are totally ignored.
Now look at this.
I want to be a Marketer?
Recently, I graduated from college. Before you flood me with golf claps, let me inform you that I have been in and out of higher education for over 16 years. Matter-of-fact the above picture is my graduation announcement - to emphasize my point. Anywhoo, my sad desperation to make up lost time has become palpable. Nay, it has become an absolute driving force in my life. Maybe it is an early mid-life crisis, I may never know. Maybe the fact the schooling is free - nah, that can not be it. Regardless of why, I have started my MBA. This has lead me to attend a marketing class, the first in my long, illustrious student career.
Surprisingly, I enjoyed it and learned a lot. One thing the professor emphasized was the cost of a marketing campaign. I built my theoretical one around The Lunch Game, the best Facebook application ever. As far as I was concerned this innovation, handed down to my friends by the grace of Zeus himself, could be pimped successfully with whatever I could dig out of my car seats. But alas, my arm was twisted behind my back to force me to spend hundreds of thousands of hard-earned yet simulated cash.
So I can relate when I see the Pepsi logo redesign madness - and the cost. But let me assure you that rolling out a new branding for a huge corporation is nothing to be taken lightly - so if the logo is a worthwhile expression of the corporate identity then…
Wait…that’s it? Jeezus. Hundreds of millions of dollars for that? Holy crap. Maybe the entire campaign will make sense if you see the marketing video presentation:
Find more videos like this on AdGabber
Or maybe not. Apparently, the economy is going to hell in a handbasket but bloated, overkill marketing screwjobs are still alive and well.
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Speaking of economical hell, I can not express strongly enough how surreal it is reading business rags in this day and age. It’s a lot like reading christian magazines if the apocalypse was dragging out for months and months. I imagine article titles would include “Why That Handjob in the Back of your Dad’s Pontiac in ‘87 is Coming Back to Haunt You” and “Pitchfork Proof and Loving It - The Fourteen Homeless that Knew”. I came across yet another article about how General Mills is saving bundles by “optimizing” their Hamburger Helper products. Specifically, they are minimizing the number of pasta shapes. I know I have expressed in the past my distaste in these particular foodstuffs, and the fact it still sells billions sickens me. “You are killing yourselves and your kids” might not be a strong enough argument. In this day and age of watching your budget, I am trying another approach: the actual frugality of the ghastly boxes of salty doom. Check out my math (all prices from Albertson’s online as I write this):
Box of Hamburger Helper = $2.99
1 pound of ground beef, being conservative = 2.99
2 cups of milk = 1 gallon/8 = 3.99/8 = .50
Total cost = $6.48/2 servings = $3.24 per person
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Now compare this to something way more tasty, way more convenient, and with probably a lot less sodium and fat:
Stouffer’s Frozen Lasagna with Meat Sauce family size = $8.99/3 servings = $2.99 per person
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You may wonder why those serving numbers don’t match the boxes. Well, if those boxes had asses, you know they would be flat-out lying out of them. In the history of Hamburger Helper, a box has never been split between more than two hungry people over the age of four. Also, Stouffer’s goes down pretty easy - especially if it has had time to coagulate in the refrigerator, then brough to luke-warm before devouring. In conclusion, I’m pretty sure if the apocalypse does come, it will commence with a Hamburger Helper Beef Stroganoff hailstorm.
Newstopia Explains the Federal Reserve, the US Electoral System and the iGun.
Accurately.
The Electoral System:
This one sound familiar? I love these guys.
Makes you want to go out and get one of these:
This Guy is Smarter than I
You know my thinking - the country needs money, right? All the rich bastards that have been sucking off the low-tax teat for the past oh, quarter-century, can foot the bill. Seems like common sense to me, although I’m just a simple man. Maybe not a “joe six pack”, thank GOD, but someone who’s only taken a couple economics courses and didn’t get good grades to boot. I can blather quite a bit. Nevertheless, I see individuals pulling down seven, eight, nine figures for essentially shuffling numbers and it irks me when they pay fewer taxes than me. It’s not quite jealousy; call it quiet rage. However, this guy elaborates on the recent history of taxes and the results, and does so quite well. I know, I know…The Huffington Post is screaming liberal. Take it with a grain of salt, but it still makes sense.
Bail Out From Hell.
My plan is to make this post brief - let’s see how it goes.
I have heard more politicians over the last few days that I’d like to remember talk about the financial bail out plan - you know the 700 billion dollars tax payers are going to borrow from the federal reserve to “buy up” crappy investments of major banks and wall street fat cats so that they can ignore the fact that they all F’d up. Allow me to give a brief synopsis and dialogue of what I have heard. Realize that the following is paraphrasing - granted most will be direct quotes, but hey who cares.
Politician 1: If we do not act now, if we do not make this bail out plan work, if we do not set aside 700 billion dollars (could be a trillion, we really aren’t sure yet), if we do not make these moves to save these institutions then millions of people could lose their investments, could lose their money, could lose their retirement plans, could lose their houses, their cars, their ways to get more credit, and could lose their jobs! WE COULD END UP IN A DEPRESSION!
Politician 2: So what stipulations and controls are you putting into place on this 700 billion dollars?
Politician 1: Huh?
Politician 3: Will this bail out save the economy?
Politician 1: How about them Yankees? Hell of a team!
Politician 2: You keep saying could but I have yet to hear words like “WILL”. Do you actually know?
Politician 1: Yes we could have lots of bad stuff happen! BOO! RAWR!
And there you have it. Lots of people in politics right now want to cough up 700 billion dollars of the tax payers money to bail out massive corporations. If it is done several things WILL take place:
- The United States CANNOT be counted as a capitalistic society. In Capitalistic societies companies who screw up die - they aren’t bailed out by the government.
- The US government will be involving itself directly in citizen run business - this is Financial Socialism.
- The national deficit WILL grow.
Before this bill passes I want to see a list of investments that every single politican owns and check off how many of them have investments in the very firms they are planning to “save”. Can you say CONFLICT OF INTERESTS?
All that said - anyone ever been to Belize?
MoMajic Mo Money
I was speaking with Mo the other day regarding the state of the economy and he told me a ton of things but one really stuck out: “If I was anyone in this country right now I’d pull no less than 20% of my money out of my bank in cash and find a nice place to hide it.” Turns out he actually did that.
Let’s examine the nature of that statement. At the tail end of last week Washington Mutual (WaMu for short), the largest commercial bank in the USA went under. If not for JPMorgan-Chase (who by the way is near the top of the evil list to me, right next to Hitler, Satan and Ho-Hos) buying up the company at a nice cheap rate the company and all her little friends would be totally dead. Today we find out another commercial bank is about to topple as well - Wachovia. So by the “HOLY CRAP BANKS ARE FAILING” score - Mo is totally correct.
Economists would argue that his suggestion is a bad one as there exists this concept that banks fold when all their customers actuall want their money back. The process is called a “Run on the Bank” as all the customers are running to the doors to see if they can get any of their cash back. If you have seen “It’s a Beautiful Life” then you have witnessed this happen in a film - and even in a film the entire action wasn’t pretty with people throwing stuff, yelling epitaphs etc.
So what happens when there is a run on a bank for roughly 20% of all the cash in the bank? About the same thing. As I indicated in a previous post about Banking, banks are strenuosly strapped for their actual value - meaning they have lent out loads of cash and expect people to not actually ask for any of it back, at least not in droves. You may have encountered a bank not wanting to give you your money back before if you went in and ask for a large sum of money - yeah I don’t have any either but I have heard rumor that people do try to do this and are often rebuked.
Given that GlazedNConfused always thinks I write rubbish with no point, here is the point - crap I don’t have one. I am all for pulling my money out of the bank, in fact my wife and I are discussing doing so, but I also realize that if everyone does this then, well, we may actually help close more banks.
What to do? What to do?
How Does Banking Work?
Watch this entire series. Even though it will terrify you, after watching it you will completely understand how the market is crashing.
Liquidity is Confidence.
So like every other morning, today I was listening to NPR on the way to work - sorry gang they are the closest thing to real news on the radio. Anywoot, they had this expert financial buff on there who was talking about the state of the economy, GLOBALLY. Here are a few things he had to say:
- Nobody trusts anybody anymore, primarily because all of the CEOs and companies they work for can’t get their balance sheets straight. (In other words they are liars.)
- Financial Institutions have invested some times as much as 30 times their actual worth! (In other words when their investments go belly up and there is something akin to a Margin Call, said company goes belly up as well.)
- The American Dollar value is soaring. (There is nothing to invest in so people are just sending their money to the USA)
- There is 6 Trillion Dollars sitting in accounts right now looking for something to do - and nobdy has anything. (If you are looking for a time to find investors STRIKE NOW!)
- The USA is looking to purchase up 700 billion dollars worth of bad mortgages. (coughSOCIALISMcough.)
GlazedNConfused always jumps on me about my articles not having a point. “Great information Thraxxus - Whats the F’n Point?” Well according the the expert dude on NPR “The economy is FAR FROM F’N OK!”
There is your F’n point mister!
Capital Gains Tax, Heal Thy Country!
In case you’ve been living on Saturn for the last six months and this is the only BB post you read when you came back, bad news: our financial system is going to hell in a handbasket. This handbasket has been carried by very wealthy individuals who put their philosophy first before everyone else. This philosophy was “Make as much money as God before everyone finds out how reckless we’ve been”. So now that the market has crumbled, crumbled, everyone has ideas how to fix it. To paraphrase a criminally underrated metal band, if there’s a new way then I’ll be the first in line. But it had better work this time.
Well, this one’s for you, Mr. Mustaine. My very simple suggestion: tax the holy hell out of the rich. Not just a few percentage points here and there like Obama is suggesting. I’m proposing taxes of Canadian proportions. How does the range of 40-50% grab you? If you are making more than, let’s say $10mil annually, it grabs you by the teabags. Why that number? I have no idea. But the number is not important. What’s critical is what it symbolizes - that wild excess is no longer celebrated in America. The problem with most of the solutions, which include increased accountability and regulations, is the simple fact that the people in charge of fixing the system are owned by the people with the most to lose. If Thraxxus’ socialistic rantings haven’t been clear enough, let me simplify: big business and the our government are so intimate, they are on their way to Macy’s right now to pick out a china pattern.
However, the IRS doesn’t dick around. If you change the tax laws, and make them crystal clear, all you have to do is stand back. No matter what those cheesy late-night commercials say, the IRS can not be reasoned with. They will get you eventually, and you will pay interest and penalties. Release the hounds!
Ok, I can hear the arguments. Hell, I can Google the arguments. “You are taking money that people have earned” they say. I would argue that no one person in the world actually earns that much money. Professional ballplayers are basically playing a game. Investors are playing a game, and not even with their own money. Corporate executives, if you haven’t noticed, have zero accountability. They don’t deserve what they are earning. The newly retired Bill Gates? Two words - “Windows Vista”. Steve Jobs? The Pixar guys? OK - maybe. But if a few worthy leaders and innovators get thrown under the bus, then that’s a small price to pay.
Another argument is that this type of taxation is “unAmerican”. For you fourteen readers, I have tackled the herculean task of ranking the top one thousand most “American” things you can do as an American. Due to space restrictions, here’s only a sample:
1. Dick Cheney cupcheck, at every opportunity
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17. Proudly display classic 1970s Farah Faucett poster
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34. Sarah Palin cupcheck, at every opportunity
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457. Wear a flag pin
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809. Make more than $10million in a year, while paying less taxes than a Harlem schoolteacher that’s had a knife pulled on her six times
Furthermore, consider the side-effects of cranking up taxes on the rich - there are none! If you start taxing the hell out of the poor, the results are glaring. You come home and your television has been jacked. Live news riot footage pre-empts “Dancing with the Stars”. Who needs that drama? I’m not sure what rich people do when impotency is thrust upon them, but my guess is its pretty passive. They probably just sit there behind their antique desks made of ivory and walnut, seething. Maybe they strangle their high-priced escorts out of frustration. If TMZ is to believed, they just go shopping. Another boost to the economy! We need to face facts. The money for this new trend of American Fascist World Domination has to come from somewhere. You tell me which is more entertaining:
- Listening to single mothers whine that they can’t afford their baby’s insulin or
- Reading in business magazines about an anonymous hedge fund manager muttering under his breath that he’ll have to settle for a Ferrari F430 instead of a 599 this year.
So you ask, how is such a brutal, discriminative tax law going to be passed by the very people it will cornhole most? Here’s the only way: first, Obama gets elected. His enthnicity is key, plus his Veep choice is the second-poorest Congressman. Second, a group of lobbyists, oil execs, southern state congressmen, or various Good-Old-Boy Club members get caught on cellphone video calling our president the N-Word. You just know it’s going to happen. They’ll be sitting in a bar, four cocktails into two-hour lunch paid for by you, and someone will slip. Something like “Can you believe a n—– got elected as president?”, and everyone will somberly nod. Obama’s response would be swift: “N—–?! I’ll show you rich c*cksuckers a n—–!!!” and that will be that. Rooting for naked prejudice - a sacrifice that I’m willing to make for my country. It’s #140 on my list.