Deep thought

It's been 9 years since Congress passed the Bush tax cuts.

Why would anyone think that extending them will lead to any different result than what we have now?

Continue reading Deep thought

Another one bites the dust

Ritz Camera, the largest dedicated camera retailer in the US has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company, which owns over 800 stores across the country, under a series of names, including Wolf Camera, has proposed a restructuring plan that will aim to see the chain continue in some form. As part of this, the company has applied to the bankruptcy court for permission to continue to honor its customer loyalty and rebate schemes.

In an affidavit to the court Marc Weinsweig, appointed as Chief Restructuring Officer and COO as part of the Chapter 11 process, describes his actions as being aimed at 'maintaining the day-to-day operations of the company's business with minimal disruption' in what he characterizes as 'daunting economic times.'

Court papers suggest that Ritz Cameras owes over $40 million to its two largest creditors: Nikon's US subsidiary Nikon Inc. and Canon USA, with a further $8.4 million owed to Fujifilm USA, a subsidiary of which owns around a third of the company. To put the $26.6 million owed to Nikon Inc. into perspective, it would represent somewhere in the region of 20% of Nikon Inc's expected annual operating income.

Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code provides companies with protection from their creditors while they attempt to restructure. However, US retailer Circuit City, which filed for bankruptcy protection in November 2008 announced the closure of all its stores and the liquidation of its assets on January 16th.

Yeah, i know. Buying a camera from Ritz or Wolf was not the most enjoyable experience. But with the demise of big box chains, specialty chains, and even locally owned specialty stores, where the hell are you going to go to, you know, buy shit any more? I'm not interested in buying everything i want to have from Amazon.com. Sometimes i want to see it, hear it, and hold it before i buy it.

And given that we're a service economy, losing all these service jobs doesn't bode well for the short term, does it?

UPDATE: another thought which occurs to me is that, even though big retail chains pull a lot of money out of the local economy, they do at least collect local sales taxes. If even the big boxes (Circuit City) and the specialty retailers (Tweeter, Wolf Camera) leave, and people are buying what few items they do spend their money on online, how are those taxes collected? I know you're supposed to calculate that on your state tax return every year, but i wonder how many people actually do that? How much additional revenue does the city and county stand to lose if even the national retail chains don't survive the ongoing economic disaster?

Continue reading Another one bites the dust

So long ago

Remember when if we didn't give 700 billion dollars to the financial system, we were all going to die?

Continue reading So long ago

Hitting close to home

I hear Cary Printing and Graphics Inc. have both closed their doors this week. Not that printing has even been a recession proof industry (the shop i worked at in Sacramento didn't survive the 93-94 recession, even though it was 100+ years old, for example) but i wasn't aware that there was so much excess capacity in town. Guess the election season wasn't enough to build up a cushion to survive the current downturn.

Continue reading Hitting close to home

Layoffs

After seeing the story in the Herald Sun this morning, in which Mayor Bill Bell is quoted as "hinting" that layoffs are a possibility within city government, a reader emails me to ask whether Durham will be taking requests?

Continue reading Layoffs

Numbers

BBC:

The UN has launched an appeal for $613m to help people affected by Israel's military offensive in Gaza.

"These needs are massive and multi-faceted," the body's top official Ban Ki-Moon said at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

He added that funds would be used to "help overcome at least some measures of this hardship".

New York Times:

By almost any measure, 2008 was a complete disaster for Wall Street — except, that is, when the bonuses arrived.

Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year.

That was the sixth-largest haul on record, according to a report released Wednesday by the New York State comptroller

. . .

The comptroller’s estimate, a closely watched guidepost of the annual December-January bonus season, is based largely on personal income tax collections. It excludes stock option awards that could push the figures even higher.

The state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, said it was unclear if banks had used taxpayer money for the bonuses, a possibility that strikes corporate governance experts, and indeed many ordinary Americans, as outrageous. He urged the Obama administration to examine the issue closely.

In a year when Wall Street firms had to beg the US government for hundreds of billions to cover their losses, their execs got bonuses which could alleviate the suffering of hundreds of thousands thirty times over.

Continue reading Numbers

"Incomprehensible"

"Forty percent of the world's wealth was destroyed in the last five quarters. It is an almost incomprehensible number," said Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the leading private equity company Blackstone Group.

For some people, 40% is a lot.

Continue reading "Incomprehensible"

Bargains!

Circuit City:

US electronics retailer Circuit City is to close after failing to reach a deal with its creditors and lenders, with the loss of 30,000 jobs.

Liquidators will now sell off the firm's assets. The announcement comes two months after the firm was forced to seek bankruptcy protection.

Some 567 Circuit City stores will now shut for the last time. About 155 stores had already closed in December.

Circuit City vice chairman James Marcum said the decision was "regrettable".

I'd love to see what Marcum and the rest of CC's management team managed to walk away with over the past 2 years. Hopefully the hourly employees will at least get first pick at discounted merchandise which they otherwise won't be able to afford, but maybe this is my chance for that 1080i flat screen.

Continue reading Bargains!

Deep thought

The world at the end of the Obama administration is going to look very different from the world at the beginning of the Obama administration.

The Times previously refused to sell the Globe after former General Electric Co Chief Executive Jack Welch and former advertising executive Jack Connors reportedly asked about the possibility. At the time, they valued the Pulitzer prize-winning newspaper at $550 million to $600 million, the Journal said. Barclays now values the Globe at about $20 million.

Happy war on Christmas. Don't shoot your eye out.

Continue reading Deep thought

Job creation program

Their deployment as a makeshift missile robbed President George Bush of his dignity and landed their owner in jail. But the world's most notorious pair of shoes have yielded an unexpected bonanza for a Turkish shoemaker.

Ramazan Baydan, owner of the Istanbul-based Baydan Shoe Company, has been swamped with orders from across the world, after insisting that his company produced the black leather shoes which the Iraqi journalist Muntazar al-Zaidi threw at Bush during a press conference in Baghdad last Sunday.

Baydan has recruited an extra 100 staff to meet orders for 300,000 pairs of Model 271 - more than four times the shoe's normal annual sale - following an outpouring of support for Zaidi's act, which was intended as a protest, but led to his arrest by Iraqi security forces.

Orders have come mainly from the US and Britain, and from neighbouring Muslim countries, he said.

Around 120,000 pairs have been ordered from Iraq, while a US company has placed a request for 18,000

I may order me a pair as a gift for Rick Warren. Special hand delivery.

Continue reading Job creation program

Wow

Just, wow.

Chrysler said it would shut down all of its production for at least a month, effective from the last shift on Friday.

Continue reading Wow

Serene, and a little bit out of touch with reality

So there's this WaPo article on Obama's new environmental team. (Steven Chu, who is supposedly being tapped for Energy Secretary, seems like an especially brilliant choice.) the gist of the article, as so often mainstream media attempts to portray the world, is that some in the environmental movement see the new players as "not radical enough" while some in the business community see them as "too radical."

Especially clueless is the VP of the US Chamber of Commerce:

Industry groups were more cautious. At the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Vice President William Kovacs said the group worried that the new officials would use their power to limit greenhouse-gas emissions and impose painful new costs on energy use.

"I think that they could be aggressive, and we're hoping that they're really going to look at the circumstances" of the economic downturn, Kovacs said. "That is our biggest single concern, because literally all three of them have a regulatory bent."

Let's see if i have this right. The entire US automaking industry is about ready to declare bankruptcy and this moron is worried that limiting greenhouse gas emissions is goin gto be a problem because of the economic downturn? He probaby thinks that if we cut the capital gains tax, the recession will be over.


What part of "you guys fucked it all up and you don't get to make the decisions any more" do they not understand?

Continue reading Serene, and a little bit out of touch with reality

What happened?

I thought we were in a recession? Gas is up a nickel a gallon this week.

Continue reading What happened?

I must be in the front row

Commenter at TPM:

So basically the tax payers give money to Citi to get naming rights to a stadium that the tax payers partially built so the Mets can raise ticket prices to a level that your average New Yorker cannot afford. But hey, the Citi execs will still have their luxury boxes!!!

I think everybody who has any sort of account with Citi should get to pick a date on which they get two tickets to a game next season, or the season after, if there aren't enough to go around this year. AFter all, we've paid for them.

Continue reading I must be in the front row

Ouch

Sales at retailers suffered a record decline in October, government data on Friday showed, as shoppers reined in spending with home prices falling, although plunging gasoline prices also reduced outlays by consumers.

Sales slumped 2.8 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted $363.7 billion, the largest decline since the series began in 1992, the U.S. Commerce Department said. This compared with a revised 1.3 percent fall in September, previously reported as a 1.2 percent decrease.

We were chatting with Councilman Mike Woodard on Shooting the Bull last night and learned that, so far, Durham has not seen any decline in sales tax receipts, although everyone expects that to start showing up by the next quarter. Obviously, we won't be alone when that happens. But who can predict what kind of resources are going to be available at the state and local level to help ride this out? Fortunately, we've got strong leadership in the White House:

Bush on Thursday defended his administration's response to the financial crisis, which has included massive amounts of government assistance to banks and outright government takeovers of the country's biggest mortgage finance companies.

"I'm a market-oriented guy, but not when I'm faced with the prospect of a global meltdown," Bush said in a speech in New York.

He put forward a list of modest reform proposals including making accounting rules more transparent but stopped well short of the global market regulator being sought by some European nations.

Oh, wait.

I think we need a Constitutional amendment for the "move inauguration up to the Monday before Thanksgiving" option.

UPDATE: Good to see Josh Marshall is thinking along those lines, too:

It's a question worth considering in very real terms. How much would things be different if Barack Obama had been sworn in on November 5th? The question, to some degree, gets at the very different policy perspectives of Bush and Obama. But at least as much, it points to how much things might be different right now if we had an actual president in office -- one who had some legitimacy, some level of public approval and, most importantly, knew he'd be able to see his policies through years rather than weeks into the future.

It's no one's fault, per se. It's written into our constitutional structure. But though our real and fundamental problems are profound, I think we're paying mightily for having no captain at the helm at one of the most perilous points in our recent national history.

Continue reading Ouch

The Hoov

And not just because he sucks like a vacuum around Uranus:

Asserting the global financial crisis is "not a failure of the free market," President George W. Bush on Thursday called on the world leaders meeting this weekend to agree on a modest set of reforms aimed at preventing future collapses.

Bush's main message to the leaders about to converge on Washington: Reforms won't help if they overreach by abandoning the free market and restricting trade.

"Government intervention is not a cure-all," Bush was to say in a speech here, according to prepared remarks released in advance by the White House.

Have we ever had an executive s disconnected from reality as Bush? All that's missing here is a plea to lower the capital gains tax, and i wouldn't be surprised if he says that, too.

Continue reading The Hoov

She was only trying to help

Despite reports that Sarah Palin's September shopping spree amounted to "tens of thousands" more than the $150K previously reported, "Among retailers, the luxury department store chain Neiman Marcus reported the deepest drop in sales at stores open at least a year, a crucial indicator also known as same-store sales.

October sales in Neiman’s specialty retail segment, which includes Neiman Marcus Stores and Bergdorf Goodman, were down 27.6 percent, in contrast to an increase of 7.8 percent a year ago."

She tried. She really did.

Continue reading She was only trying to help

Redistributing wealth

Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest publicly traded oil company, reported income Thursday that shattered its own record for the biggest profit from operations by a U.S. corporation, earning $14.83 billion in the third quarter.

Yet numbers contained within the company's most recent financial report revealed production numbers that continue to sag, and shares slipped 3 percent in midday trading.

The Irving, Texas-based company has reported unprecedented back-to-back quarters, the end of the most recent coinciding with a rapid plunge in crude prices. Benchmark oil prices fell another $2.91 to $64.59 Thursday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, about 56 percent off record highs in July.

Exxon said net income jumped nearly 58 percent to $2.86 a share in the July-September period. That compares with $9.41 billion, or $1.70 a share, a year ago.

The previous record for U.S. corporate profit was set in the last quarter, when Exxon Mobil earned $11.68 billion.

Revenue rose 35 percent to $137.7 billion.

Continue reading Redistributing wealth

Headlines you don't want to read before your morning coffee

Markets in Tailspin

Global Shares Plummet on Gloomy Data

Stock Futures Frozen After Steep Plunge

Guess i won't be retiring before i'm 98 after all.

Continue reading Headlines you don't want to read before your morning coffee

Gas prices

My money says gas prices get below $2.69 by Election Day.

Continue reading Gas prices