October 26, 2008
Isn't anyone a little bothered about PNC-National City?
Treasury invests $7.7 billion in PNC, which turns around and buys National City for $5.6 billion - mostly in stock. So far, so good - though I'm waiting to see whether any lending liquidity eventually gets generated by the Treasury investment, or our dollars simply fund PNC's dreams for "bigness"...
But what bothers me is that certain equity investment firms will cash out hundreds of millions of dollars for investments it now appears they should never have made in the first place.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
The Financial Crisis - and what it means for Technology
October 16, 2008
The Financial Crisis - and what it means for Technology
For roughly the last 25 years, business has focused on growth - with technology its lens. As of Friday evening, September 12 2008, that focus turned abruptly to one of “all-out corporate cost containment." Until now, decision-support technologies (known as "Business Intelligence" and "Performance Management" systems in the IT world) have largely existed for the benefit of sales and customer-related growth-oriented activities. In fact, these environments lived on quite happily despite an uneasy, almost surreal, detachment from the world of true accounting debits and credits. As long as sales kept going up, conformity and harmonization between business intelligence systems and company financial statements “would always be nice,” but not critical. However, with cost containment now the goal, technical indifference to these less familiar (to IT, at least), perhaps less approachable financial accounting systems is no longer possible.
As this dramatic upheaval in the financial markets sets the stage, we now witness a seismic and historic transformation from...
“Technology for Growth Enablement” (R.I.P. 1982-2008)
to...
“Technology for Cost Containment” (2009-?)"
- Michael Zimmerman
Business Intelligence and Performance Management Consultant
FOOD FOR THOUGHT...
October 9, 2008
FOOD FOR THOUGHT... A theory for reversing the recessionThink about it. Instead of raising taxes on the wealthy, the government could give anyone who can afford to do so a substantial tax break for DESTROYING their major assets (houses, cars, computers, yachts, anything really...) as long as they immediately replaced them with newly-made equivalents of equal or greater value.
Let's use an analogy. Over the first three decades of the last century, wheat production grew faster than the population. Wheat farmers could earn a small fortune by growing more and more of it. City dwellers fled to the country to cash in on the riches. By the 1920's, a glut of wheat existed, prices dropped and farmers grew even more just to stay afloat. By the 1930's, grain elevators were stuffed full and crops were rotting, yet the American public was going hungry. Ultimately, the oversupply was corrected when the government paid (subsidized) farmers to plow their crops under.
Could that work on a similar scale today with homes, cars, or anything else where making it again would create jobs and opportunities?
FOOD FOR THOUGHT... A theory for reversing the recessionThink about it. Instead of raising taxes on the wealthy, the government could give anyone who can afford to do so a substantial tax break for DESTROYING their major assets (houses, cars, computers, yachts, anything really...) as long as they immediately replaced them with newly-made equivalents of equal or greater value.
Let's use an analogy. Over the first three decades of the last century, wheat production grew faster than the population. Wheat farmers could earn a small fortune by growing more and more of it. City dwellers fled to the country to cash in on the riches. By the 1920's, a glut of wheat existed, prices dropped and farmers grew even more just to stay afloat. By the 1930's, grain elevators were stuffed full and crops were rotting, yet the American public was going hungry. Ultimately, the oversupply was corrected when the government paid (subsidized) farmers to plow their crops under.
Could that work on a similar scale today with homes, cars, or anything else where making it again would create jobs and opportunities?
What's come down, must have gone up - sometime
October 8, 2008
SERIOUSLY, FOLKS! What's come down, must have gone up - sometime.For all the whining about how a foreclosure next door impacts the value of your home and how unfair that it is - I've never heard anyone complain when the next door neighbor's home went UP in price and "therefore my home got a bounce in value"!
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