1970: Chevy Corvair owned by my friend Stillman finally gives out with about 250,000 miles on it. With tremendous respect, we take it to the parking lot of Shea Stadium, take off the wheels and put it up on blocks, saying farewell to what was, in truth, the Galapagos tortoise of automobiles.  It did very little, but what it did it did incomparably.

1978: Pontiac V8. Bench seats. Very comfortable. Solid body, sounded like a tank when you closed the doors. More room than a suite at the Holiday Inn. Went from 0 to 60 in about seven seconds in spite of the fact that it weighed a ton. Got about 12 miles per gallon, 16 on the highway. Never gave me a moment’s trouble. Sold it for exactly what I paid for it brand new: $2400. No car like it has ever been made anywhere but in Detroit.

1982: I find myself in Los Angeles for a few days and decide to rent a Cadillac Eldorado. Big mother of a car. Drives like an big old boat; you can feel the body floating along on the chassis like a fat man in a swimming pool.  After a decade of Toyotas, it feels like I’ve come home from a pup tent to an enormous, comfortable house that anticipates my every need. When I am forced to give the car back, I almost weep.  

2000: I am looking for a car that expresses my inner child. After a few test drives in assorted BMWs, Lexi and such, I am passed on the highway by a T-top Camaro doing about 110. I check it out. 345 horses. Goes from 0 to 60 in only about a half a second less than a Porsche. The interior is a bit cheesy, true, but hugely capacious compared to the itsy-bitsy Mustang, which makes me feel claustrophobic, and there’s Schwarzeneggerian muscle under the hood. Comes in at about $30,000, about fifty grand less than its closest competitor in terms of power and comfort. In the end, I find the T-top a little wearing and wish I’d gotten a convertible. But what a car! I miss it even now.

Everybody’s mad at General Motors (GM).  And of course it’s obvious they’ve messed things up entirely. Stupid GM! So many mistakes. Perhaps a quick Chapter 11 is the only way to go here, I don’t know. I do know one thing, however. GM makes good cars. Have you seen the new 2010 Camaro?

I could lose 1000 banks as long as mine doesn’t fail.  Every hedge fund in the world could go under as far as I’m concerned. But we’d better be pretty careful about our good old American car business. I mean, if they go, can the cheeseburger be far behind?

Dear Uncle Larry and Aunt Bea,

It’s been a hard weekend, which is the only excuse I have for not answering your e-mail sooner. I’m sure the May 9th date will work out fine for the barbecue. I don’t have anything planned for that week, or the week before. Or the week after, for that matter, although I do have a couple of interviews for excellent management positions in a number of very attractive companies, none of which have anything to do with cars I’m happy to say. I’ve just about had enough of the automobile business, I can tell you that!

You’re right, though. That phone call from Mr. Ratner was a little tough to take. I remember Steve when he was a young reporter for the New York Times, and now he’s, like, the big boss of everybody I know. It’s kind of creepy, if you ask me. You’re sitting there with a nice plate of ham and eggs on a weekend morning and there’s this fellow on the telephone telling you that you’ve been fired. It was weird. Kind of a take-it-or-leave-it thing. Like, either I leave or the company doesn’t get the $16 billion. Talk about a no-brainer. Not that I didn’t think about it for a few minutes.

My first reaction was to run through all the good friends and allies I’ve built up in the company and the industry after all my years of service, and wonder what kind of push-back they were going to make on my behalf. That didn’t take long. Then I said okay. Mr. Ratner was very nice about it, by the way. I didn’t envy him the job. You can just imagine the conversation he had with Mr. Obama when they decided to take me out. “Have Tim do it,” says Mr. Ratner. “No,” says Mr. Obama, “Tim’s very busy” and so forth.

I think it’s very nice of you, Larry, to offer me such a key slot in your furniture store. I’m thinking it over very seriously, of course. I don’t know a lot about that business. But you know what they say. Management is management whatever kind of business you’re in. The capabilities you pick up in one industry are easily transferred to others once you master the basics of their operations. And my years at GM have certainly allowed me to develop a world-class skill set.

One thing is for sure. I’m going to need something. I asked Mr. Ratner what kind of severance package I could expect after all my years of service. I think he was about to answer when his cell phone must have given out. I’ll be getting back to them about that later, but I have a bad feeling about it for some reason.

Anyhow, say hello to the cousins and give an extra biscuit to Fluffy for me. And keep that fold out couch ready for me. I might need it!

Luv ya,

Rick

We’re not going to recover as a economy if there are so many shorts in the market. The whole system is now basically being run by people who are betting against the rest of us. This means that every time hope begins to bubble up and good, solid, honest, positive investors start seeing a little bit of light at the end of the funnel of doom, the shorts run in and lay a tiny little turd in the punchbowl. They’re bummers. 

I kind of reached my limit the other day when the market was feeling good about itself and Mr. Tim Geithner, who had suddenly mutated from Goat of the Month to My Hero status. Amazing how fast those things turn these days, isn’t it?

Anyway, the Dow was up, like, 400 points, and I called up our investor relations guy and said, hey, this is pretty great, huh? And he said, well, yes it is, for sure, but a lot of the analysts out there just think it’s a dead cat bounce. And I said, “huh?” and he explained to me what a dead cat bounce was. Apparently, it’s a phrase of some longevity, even though honestly I never heard it before. You can tell what it means. Like, you think the cat is alive and well and jumping around, but in actually the cat is dead and even a dead cat bounces, and that’s what the market is doing when people invest in their belief that some companies might be worth more than 10% of their 2008 value. 

The thing is, there’s no upside for the dead cat people if the cat is still alive. And they’re the ones who are driving the Street around the bend right now. How are we supposed to do better if the only financial upside for so many people is if we do worse? 

There are plenty of other things that the shorts could be doing. They could be salting the fields of farmers trying to grow next year’s wheat crop, or releasing toxic nuclear waste into the ocean. I suggest they get busy with these kinds of activities and get out of our collective economic face.

1. 59 yo-yos, purchased over a lifetime on the principle that they would accrue in value and eventually be collector’s items, as indeed they are, in the sense that they seem to be of interest only to the person who collected them. Current value: $157 dollars. 

2. Large portfolio of comic books circa 1966 – 2006, assembled after I found out that my mother had thrown away all my Silver Age Marvel comics. Collection includes many vintage R. Crumbs, entire run of Spawn, Preacher, and many other underground titles. Current value estimated, by me, to be far from the $5 million projected, by me, while the process of investment was underway. 

3. 50 shares of Google (GOOG) purchased for a stagnant IRA of mine at approximately $700 per share not all that long ago, when we all had nowhere to go but up. Yesterday’s share price: $324. 

4. Assorted shares of other “blue-chip” firms purchased 1995-2000, when I decided to “go conservative” in the market. Current decline in value: 90%. 

5. A number of stock options now valued by ridiculous accounting rules to be worth something. Actual value in foreseeable future given the state of the economy and tremulous state of Wall Street: $0.00. 

6. Several contracts that provide “guaranteed” income from firms that now no longer exist. Black-Scholls value of these worthless contracts: $14,530,423.34. 

7. One co-op in New York City. Present estimate of market value: Will accept any reasonable offer. 

8. One twelve-year-old cocker spaniel, selectively incontinent, likes chocolate. Current value: Priceless.

Just a note this morning to ask a certain party to get off my blog. I don’t do this very often. Most spam I just delete. But I’m now into double digits on this thing and I figure the time has come to give somebody a kick in the butt about it.

Before I do, I will recall one of the great moldy oldies of our common spamtastic past. Do you all remember the Nigerian 419 scam, which started, I believe, well before the Internet but has continued for some reason in the new era, in spite of all the writing that’s been done about it, my own included? I suppose it’s proof that there will always be credulous people in the world. In that appeal to global stupidity, somebody e-mails you and tells you that she or he is the tearful relative of a former member of the Nigerian military/government/royal family and that, due to uncertain conditions in the nation or the execution of their loved one, they are now sitting on a huge amount of money which they would like you to come to Nigeria and take out of the bank, at which point you will get a hefty piece of the pie. Incredibly, people have done this. But there’s now quite a bit of awareness about the scam, so maybe a few potential idiots have been saved.

So now I’m going to send up a flare. About three times a week now, I get the following comment, which is immediately sent to spam:

 I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

The message is then signed by a name: Ruth, Marvin, Pete, whatever, and is always then followed with some lame internet link that has something to do with finance. Interestingly, the link is never the same. So I don’t really get it. But you know what? I don’t want to.

The first time I got this form of spam, I was kind of flattered, until I saw the link and realized it was a creepy ruse to get people to contact the nefarious denizens of those web destinations. Now I know. Nobody “recently came across my blog.” Nobody “has been reading along.”  It’s just another bunch of scuzzy losers trying to get over on people.

So get lost, Ruth, Betty, Bob and Ingrid. Unless, of course, you have $111 million dollars in an African bank you’d like to withdraw. Then I think I could help!

When is enough of a good thing way too much? When you’re flying American (AMR). Somewhere along the line somebody must have done a focus group or something, because it’s apparent that the airline believes that fulsome, frank communications with passengers is of fabulous benefit to everybody. The effort is obviously well-intentioned. But the outcome is perhaps not.

I first noticed this a few years ago, when I would be sitting and waiting for a mysterious amount of time on the tarmac and then Chuck Yeager would come on the public address system with something like, “First of all, I’d like to thank you all for your patience…” This immediately drained whatever patience I was trying to cultivate. I hate being thanked for my patience. “… but there’s an amber light here in the cockpit that we’re checking out.”

That was bad. There are a lot of reasons for amber lights, none of them particularly encouraging. Did I need to know about the amber light? Maybe. Did I want to fly in a plane that sported one, even briefly? Again, not too sure. I did know that the announcement did very little to help my frame of mind, but I guess they were just trying to be responsible and blah blah blah.

The trend has continued to develop, with ever-increasing levels of frankness being employed to win our admiration and regard. Which is fine. Unless, you know, it freaks us out entirely.

It’s my perception, which may be completely off base (but I don’t think so) that American Airlines hasn’t put a new plane into domestic service in quite some time.  A little while back, they fooled me for a while with some new seating arrangements, but then I realized the snazzy new electric chairs had been installed into the same old Boeings. What American does instead, and it is very much to its credit, is to swarm over every airplane before it is permitted to leave the ground, fixing, checking, making sure that it is truly airworthy. This means a lot of late departures and safe arrivals. Still, I sometimes think they should post all take-off and landing times with a big fat asterisk.

Anyhow, yesterday I was scheduled to depart at 1:50 from San Francisco. The plane was slow to board. It is my belief, based on years of experience, that even the most infinitesimal delay at any point in the chain usually results in hours and hours of snafus and fubars, very often ending in the scrubbing of the flight and total decomposition of my day/week.  So my hair-trigger gut was telling me a) we had a problem and b) there was, therefore, a 68.4% chance that we would never take off at all, when Chuck Yeager came on the intercom.

“Well,” he said, “we were all ready to go, but it appears that the brakes on the left side of the plane need to be replaced.” He then went on about how that was really not a very big deal at all and that it might take less than half an hour and so on and so forth, but I didn’t hear a thing, all I could get into my mind was the image of a plane landing at Kennedy Airport in New York and careening into Jamaica Bay when its brakes gave out.

“This is too much information for me,” I said to the dead-heading flight attendant in the next seat.

“Well,” he said, “I guess they’re just trying to be honest.”

I get that. Honesty is a virtue. In this case, however, something seems out of whack. Next time I would suggest something like, “There’s a bit of weather in New York, and we’re going to make sure that we have clear skies for your landing there. Kick back and have a free drink on us.”

I like that much better. Not that such obfuscation is always called for. How different the world would look now if some honest broker had announced, “Well, we were doing fine until about a month ago, when it became obvious that our insurance was underwritten by a host of bad mortgage loans…”

You guys aren’t going to like this, but you know who I feel sorry for? Edward Liddy. That’s right. He’s the guy the government appointed to run AIG after Hank Greenberg and his gang set it up to crash and burn. Today Greenberg popped up on television like a vicious Mini-Me to pile on the dead bunny.

Greenberg left in a scandal in 2005 after setting up the business unit that got AIG into all of its trouble. You know that operation. The Financial Products group that came up with all those cute derivatives backed with now-toxic instruments. And here he is this morning, jabbering away like a wise elder statesman. Pfui.

This was only slightly worse than the drubbing that Mr. Liddy took at the hands of the suddenly irate congressmen in Washington on Wednesday. Many of our senior legislators had good points to make, no question about it. The situation is dire, and certainly subject to Federal review, as it was years ago when the SEC was supposed to be regulating the industry. Most of the politicians acquitted themselves well. But at times the hectoring got out of hand, to the point where you might have thought, if you were a cynical type of person, that these members of Congress were trying to come up with the quintessential sound bite that would land them on the evening news. Sure enough, at the end of the day, it was the showboat from Massachusetts whose “have you no shame!” diatribe did get the most airtime. I guess he knows his business, too.

Of course, Edward Liddy isn’t blameless. He obviously made some very bad decisions. But he is only the last in a series of managers – both at AIG and elsewhere – who has done so. It’s pretty evident noxious stuff has been going on everywhere for years. The culture of compensation of which he was a part is so deeply ingrained in corporate culture now that even Tim Geithner, the guy who is supposed to oversee the bailouts, didn’t pop up a huge red flag when he first heard about AIG’s contractual obligations to its disgraced lunkheads. 

Worst of all, for the poor doofus on the stand, is the thought that you’ve got to know is running through his head as everybody is saying nasty things about his mother: “I’m doing all this for one dollar a year.” 

Man. I would do it for less than five. As long as it came with a guaranteed bonus.

So now Congress is going to go after the AIG bonuses, responding to the rage that most sentient beings are feeling right now about the whole question. One suggestion is that the Government simply impose a 100% tax on the sums received by A.I.G. bonus heads. This would seem to be a logical extension of the Government’s current policy of taking about 52% of all my income. Still, it’s a dramatic solution to the problem.

I’m just as mad any anybody else at those numbskulls at A.I.G., of course.  It really stinks. You have to wonder how a “retention bonus” is meant to affect the performance of a manager who has already left the organization. Like, that’s just stupid.

If you want to give me some bulls**t rationale for why you’re going to suck up billions of dollars and spew it out to your colleagues and pals, come up with something credible or at least appropriately truculent, like “We did it. We’re keeping it. If you don’t like it, fire us and pay us our contractually-mandated severance packages.”  That at least is a truthful presentation of the executive mind-set.

Still, you have to worry a little about the policy implications. Does the government – even in pursuit of fairness and equity – have the right to implement new, punitive laws against individuals who have displeased it, and Us? New laws that prevent such things happening in the future, no question. But laws that retroactively impose justice kind of make me nervous for some reason. 

In the case of A.I.G., the government owns 80% of the company now, so it’s easy simply to assert that We the People can pretty much do what we want. And maybe we should. There’s no question that taxpayers didn’t fork over all that money so that individuals could haul it away in shopping bags as they exited the building they helped to wreck.

But you’ve got to think that Business is in for a really rough ride from here on in. Sweeping in on the heels of what all these moron financial types and other brain-damaged economists have wrought will be  a host of new laws, new regulations, new ways to protect the nation and its citizens from the greed and collective criminal mind of Wall Street, its denizens and its running dogs. And we deserve whatever we get.

Newton’s Third Law states that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. He was talking about physics. But it’s equally applicable to less scientific stuff as well.

Terror, for instance, breeds repression and a more surveillant society, one more concerned about safety and security and less about personal liberty.  In the wake of 9/11, this country did many things out of anger, fear and a desire to hold those guilty accountable. Some were reasonable. Others, in retrospect, were not.  Equal and opposite reactions are not always as good as they first may appear. 

Bernie Madoff is not the only criminal who prowled Wall Street. In many ways, he’s just the fall guy, a dramatic extension of the way business was done every day in the big craps game. In these A.I.G. guys, we have a perfect example of the global business culture that ran things for a long time and still does. Their very presence cries out for retribution, and Newton must be served.

The ongoing AIG mess provides us with an interesting sidelight today – the use of an excuse that is no longer acceptable in the unwired global universe in which we now live. The unacceptable excuse is still unfortunately in wide use among public relations professionals who represent disgraced or beleaguered executives. Here it is, from today’s New York Times: 

Since November, A.I.G.’s financial products unit has been led by Gerry Pasciucco, a former vice chairman of Morgan Stanley who was brought in by Mr. Liddy with instructions to wind down the unit. Company executives said they faced a need to keep skilled professionals in the business unit, which traded trillions of dollars worth of financial derivatives, because it would take great expertise to shut down the business in an orderly manner and without causing more turmoil.

Christina Pretto, a spokeswoman for A.I.G., said Mr. Pasciucco was traveling on Monday and was unavailable. But she said that since his arrival, the company had reduced the volume of its financial positions by more than 25 percent, starting with the “complex and difficult-to-manage positions.”

Now, Mr. Pasciucco, the AIG executive running the bonus-hungry unit of that clueless insurance company, may be in Timbuktu, or in Katmandu, or simply in a Ramada Inn in Fresno, but I assure you that no matter how far he has travelled, how distant his locale, how remote his whereabouts, he can be reached by cell phone or BlackBerry. Be he at the bottom of the ocean! Or perched atop a Himalayan peak! He can be found.

The contemporary business climate in which we now suffer presents us with many complexities, many indignities. One of them is, unfortunately, the ubiquity of digital communications. This has many benefits, and an equal number of personal liabilities. One of them is the demise of certain excuses that used to make life more tolerable. Included are such now out-of-date chestnuts as “I’ll read that when I receive it tomorrow morning and get you an answer on it by noontime,” which was killed by the fax machine, and “I can’t get there until Tuesday so let’s postpone the meeting until then,” which was laid low by teleconference technology. And now, I’m afraid, spokespeople of executives who wish to hide from the media, the government or their estranged spouses must now come up with a replacement for “He’s traveling right now and cannot be reached.”

How about, “Hello? I can’t hear you! I’m going into a tunnel!”

Let me ask you a question: If you were a passenger on the Titanic, and somehow managed to wangle your way ahead of the women and children onto a life boat, would you demand to take your luggage?

I don’t think that’s a far-fetched comparison. Here we have a massive company that hit a huge iceberg – this one of its own devising – and just as it’s about to sink under the water it receives a timely and enormous rescue… and the guys who ran it into trouble in the first place are now leaving the boat with their silverware, furs and jewelry intact.

Of course, these are insurance guys. I don’t know what we all expect of them. In my experience, insurance guys are trained to justify just about anything.  Last month my health insurance company told me that a 5 a.m., six-hour visit I made last summer to the Emergency Room of my local hospital was not covered because it was not an emergency. It’s not that hard for people trained in that kind of reasoning to tell themselves that they’re entitled to their legally-promised bonuses.

The thing that’s interesting in this case is how many AIG executives seem to have mandatory boni in their contracts. In my experience, perhaps the top five guys in any corporation usually have that kind of protection. Here we seem to have an entire executive class that has the clause in their deals. I guess wish I had their attorney or worked in an industry that while it is so rigorous with others is so generous with itself.

There are, I suppose, only two solutions to this problem going forward. The first is for Congress to immediately pass a law that any firm that receives bailout money will be under certain constraints:

• No bonuses not approved by the taxpayers;
• No boondoggles to which the taxpayers are not invited;
• All executive expense accounts to be reviewed by Warren Buffett.

The other solution is more difficult: Trust in the people who run our financial system must be restored… one step at a time.

Wall Street thinks its problems are related to objective measures such as debt, equity, long and short selling, broken models, secular issues afflicting certain key industries. That’s nonsense. The reason why everybody is off of the investment train is a lot more simple. People hate Wall Street and the business people who work in or around it. 

It’s not hard to see why. It’s pretty clear that as things stand the interests of Wall Street are not those of working corporations and the people who are employed there. Americans are enraged and disgusted because they were sold a bill of goods and now they see the light. At the end of the great, decades-long confidence game the Street has run, we are all out of that commodity. No confidence, no investment.

How to restore that trust? I can think of one thing that could be done immediately. It’s not easy. It’s totally counter-intuitive. It will never happen. But it would be an excellent gesture. 

The AIG guys should renounce their bonuses. Their management and the government have no legal standing to do so. They’re going to have to do it for themselves. For all of us.

I say this in full knowledge of how improbable and difficult this would be. I know a whole lot of people, myself included, who depend on their bonus to live. It’s not a frill. It’s part of our compensation that we wait for, plan for, put our kids to school with. We don’t have yachts. We don’t have polo ponies. We have mortgages and child support and elderly cocker spaniels who have kidney trouble. That’s what our bonuses pay for.

But most of us don’t work for companies that have screwed up the entire economic system of the world. Most of us don’t work for corporations that require the People to step in and save their butts.  

The effect of such a renunciation would be immediate and dramatic. “Gee,” people around the world would say. “Maybe American business people aren’t total ethical morons after all.”

It’s a first step. Somebody has to take it. Why not the proud, courageous insurance men and women of AIG, standard-bearers on our collective  march toward a new tomorrow?

Aren’t you bored with career strategies? Don’t you feel sometimes, when you’re looking at business magazines or books or listening to drivel from guys who supposedly know everything, that everybody is simply reinventing the same wheel over and over again?

You’re right. The problem is that business people often need to hear the same things over and over again. It’s not because we’re stupid. Probably.

The good thing in this case is that the story is about me. I know I’m not stupid. I mean, I think I do. And yet…

Anyway, here it is: I had a problem earlier this week closing a certain situation that required resolution so that I could sleep. It wasn’t a huge thing. It was just something that I wanted done that had certain financial implications for me personally. So what did I do? I started sending e-mails.

My first e-mail went to a guy who I’d dealt with on this issue throughout the process. As happens sometimes these days, I got a message back that there was no person at the corporate e-mail address. Woooo. Spooky. Dude no longer existed. Bye bye, bro.

So I bethought myself and went down one notch on his corporate ladder, found the second person I knew in that location and e-mailed her. Nothing. That was Monday. By Tuesday, there was still nothing. I was reminded of an old song, reprised by one of my favorite groups when I was a kid. It was called Nothing. Here’s how it went:

Monday nothing
Tuesday nothing
Wednesday and Thursday nothing
Friday for a change a little more nothing
Saturday and Sunday nothing

It’s an existential song that pretty much summed up the matter as far as I was concerned. Last night I went to bed thinking that the entire deal was in the dumpster. It made me sad. During my 3:30 AM anxiety hour, I spent at least fifteen minutes obsessing about it before falling back asleep thanks to extreme boredom with myself.

This morning I went nuts. I did something I haven’t done on this kind of situation for quite some time. I abandoned the e-mail protocol and picked up a phone. Got the woman on the third ring. Turns out she’d been sick for two days. Apologized for being very busy after that. No problemo. Everything is copacetic.

This tedious conclusion is exactly what I was seeking and I could have short-circuited the whole process if I had simply talked to the person when I first had an inkling that something was awry. Sounds idiotically simple, does it not? But do you know how many people are festering right now because their corporate culture mandates exclusive use of digital communications? He’s not answering his BlackBerry! I left him six e-mails! Aieee!

I’m going to kick it up a notch from here on in. I’ve got a bone to pick with Fredricks, who owes me a nice little memo to remove my personal responsibility on a certain subject. I’ve e-mailed him about it; no response. It’s easy to ignore an e-mail. I’ve also left him two voice mails. No reply – it’s almost equally easy to duck that kind of incoming also. But it’s hard to ignore a guy who’s standing in your doorway, and the guy is quite literally right down the hall.

Once again, Bernie Madoff is about to steal something of importance from us – the right to a really juicy, lengthy, painful and entertaining trial that drags him and his family through the muck and punishes them severely for their miscreancy before they even are convicted and sentenced.

What fun that would have been! 

And how much will now be concealed in the vault of time? Where will be the testimony that reveals all the ins-and-outs of the monster’s prodigious narcissism and cruelty? Will we get to see Lady Macbeth trying to wash her hands clean on the stand? How about all the smaller hyenas and jackals that served the great, bloated predator? How many Street weasels and stoats from the SEC will breathe a sigh of relief when the files are sealed?

Doesn’t the government represent the People? And aren’t we, the People, entitled to a satisfying and educational show here?

Perhaps it’s not too late to stop this ill-advised rush to judgment. The guy is old already! Are a few years in some plush correctional facility, in which he represents the most accomplished resident of the institution, punishment enough for what he has done to so many charities, schools and retired furriers? I think not!

We should have the chance to drag this festering homunculus out into the electronic public square and stone him! Him and his little dog, too!

Write your Congressman! Call the White House! Justice must be served!

I was flying the other day and found myself seated next to a young woman headed home on her college break. She had her ear pods in for most of the flight, which was fine, since I did too. After a while we both disconnected for a little while and exchanged a few words. She did most of the talking, which was fine with me. I do enough talking. Talking is over-rated, I think. Listening is often most relaxing and far more revealing of things which might not be as boring to you as yourself at times.

It turned out that the young woman, although she certainly looked like a young woman, was a kid. “I’m going to turn 21 in two weeks and I’m going to have to cross state lines with my friends to find a place where we can really celebrate,” she said. Her school is in a rural area of the Carolinas, and no liquor is allowed on campus. The local town has one bar. She was thinking about Georgetown. Georgetown, city of sin!

Twenty-one, I thought. At that age, I didn’t have a care in the world about my future. I just assumed it would appear. The world at that time seemed ripe with opportunity. Not for her. “I’m going to grad school for a couple of years after I graduate,” she said. “I sure don’t want to be out in the job market right now.” Of course she didn’t. There is no job market to speak of.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “When you get out of grad school everything is going to be fine for you guys.” She looked doubtful but pleased. It’s nice to hear words of encouragement, even from a Boomer.

I wasn’t just blowing smoke, either. For the first time, I feel the passing of the torch from one generation to the next. I didn’t feel it when the Gen-X slacker dudes came along. I felt like we could roll over them while they snoozed with very little trouble at all. The Gen-Y go-getters also didn’t give me one moment of pause. We were in the saddle. It was a post we would not relinquish. But these Gen Zero guys who are now in college, safely ensconced, waiting for their chance? They could well be our undoing. Because right at the moment that they come out of the cozy womb of academia, there will be about a billion of us on the street, looking for a new ride.

And who would you hire? Some guy who’s 52 who has been unemployed for three years and now wants six figures and all the trimmings to get back on track? Or an adorable, well-coiffed, intelligent, ambitious 25-year-old who’s willing to start for what that Boomer used to pay his assistant?

We put our plugs in after that, and I went back to whatever dreary thing I was reading. More layoffs. More executives of my general description with their heads shoved into the toilet. More working people with seniority and benefits at every level being hosed out of the machinery of capital.

I looked over at her as we made our initial descent. She was sleeping like a baby, as well she might. When she awakes, she just might find a world that’s ready for her entire birthday party.

A few months ago, I somewhat confidently predicted that newspapers would survive the current pressure on their business. I still believe that to be true. But recent news about the news is not so good.

Today the publisher of the Miami Herald, among other papers, declared that it would cut 1600 jobs. I’m interested in this phenomenon of companies announcing their various intentions to decruit vast numbers of people. During the French Revolution, did Robespierre put out a bulletin, “12,000  to be decapitated!” I don’t think so. Of course, it would have been in French and therefore incomprehensible to me, which is not unlike most corporate announcements, come to think of it.

But why do they do it? To be honest? I don’t think that’s it, forgive me. I think it’s because somebody in the Wall Street relations end of their business thinks that’s what his audience wants to hear, and that it just might bump the stock for a couple of hours. It certainly doesn’t help anybody in-house. In this case, McClatchy, which owns the papers being affected in this cutback, certainly isn’t going to axe 1600 in one day. This leaves a poisonous aura hanging around the entire company until the final head rolls. Who benefits from that? Frankly, I think it stinks from any vantage point. It’s Management making itself look responsible and pro-active on the backs of suffering employees. Stop it.

As for newspapers, it’s hard to find anything positive to say right now. The Rocky Mountain News is gone. Seattle may lose its paper. Others are dragging themselves along like paralyzed dachshunds on rolling trolleys. Even the newspaper of record, The New York Times, is grasping about trying to figure out how to succeed. Like everybody else in business, their stock is taking a beating, but that’s not the real story. The stock price never is these days. It’s all about revenue, and that’s the rock that’s lodged in their hard place.

So to transform themselves into a leaner, 21st century beast, the Times made its employees an interesting offer – to retrain seasoned reporters to work on the Web. Let’s forget about the fact that the Web is even less profitable than its brick and mortar counterparts for a moment; it’s clearly going to be where people get at least part of their news until G3 cerebro-cortical implants come along.

Apparently, what the newspaper didn’t tell its tenured reporters was that those who were retrained would have to leave their seniority and all that came with it behind and be hired as newbie Web trawlers. Enthusiasm for the plan seems to have foundered in the wake of this insight. This entire interesting tale is laid out on former Times reporters Sharon Waxman’s The Wrap. Take a look.

Honestly, I don’t know what the bottom line will be in the end. I do know that if I have to get all my news from the Internet, I will cry.

No, but seriously. Every horrendous week that we suffer through this thing brings us closer to the day when everybody will wake up singing. We don’t really know when it’ll be. We will all have to go through a lot to get there. But it will come. And then there will be dancing in the Street and people will start getting jobs again and feeling like they can put their money in a bank without crossing themselves twice.

Until then, you know what I’d like? I’d really like to not have to continue reading big long articles or screaming blog posts telling me stuff I already know. Who needs it?

I’ll give you an example. Today the New York Times has a very well-written and well-reported piece on the fact that many “blue chip” stocks are now trading for chump change. Is there anybody who doesn’t know this? I don’t think so. I think the guy sitting on the heating grate outside my building knows it. I think people in Slovenia know it. Doesn’t this make it Not News? You would think so.

And yet here we are reading the same common knowledge over and over again every day, with everybody staring at their belly buttons and saying “Wow, it’s a belly button.”

Have a good weekend, everybody. Save a little money if you can. Spend a little too, if you feel like feeding this poor economy of ours. Either way, Monday will come either soon enough or too damn soon, depending on how you look at it. If you look at it at all. Or choose not to.

According to a new survey conducted in late January by Charles Schwab, 85% of all independent advisors believe that the recession will be over in a couple of years. Two or so, they think. Perhaps a little more. Or less.

Some believe that it will be over by the end of this year, but not many.

Others think it’s going to be bad until late 2011, although they are in the minority, or they were in late January.

Most think it’s going to be two years. Or thereabouts. Which is probably what they’re saying when they’re advising people who presumably listen to them.

Who are these people? That’s what I’d like to know.

Because according to my personal survey, conducted with the inside of my brain pan six seconds ago, 97.2 percent of non-stupid people have stopped listening to anybody’s advice, particularly that of those who offer any.

72.3% of all respondents have stopped believing that the Market is driven by any metrics at all. 82% of those have come to the conclusion that a bunch of scared lunatics have taken control of the machinery of capitalism and that there’s no sense to what these losers may do on any given day.

Interestingly, 83.4% of all intelligent people have decided that numbers themselves are weird little creatures that are about as meaningful as a plate of chocolate pudding and just as solid. Of those, 71.3% figure there is no way that anybody knows anything in a world where Warren Buffett had the worst year of his career.

And speaking personally? 100% of me wants to slap somebody when they offer a view on what other people should be doing with their money.

I know what I’m going to do with mine right now. I’m going to have a turkey sandwich. After that, I’m not making any predictions for the rest of the day, other than declaring that there’s a 100% likelihood that I’m going to be ignoring any putative punditry until 2012. Perhaps a little sooner. Or later.

This week we passed by a certain milestone for a modest little community like ours. We posted our 10,000th comment. It came from Laurel, of Santa Barbara, California, whose observation on that day was typical of the kind of thing that has made this blogspace such an addictive experience for me. Here is our 10,000th comment, rich with personal anecdote and interesting observation from someplace that is Not Here:

I live in a tourist town, santa barbara, ca. I have been watching the stores close for a few years now and the staff in the remaining ones becoming more harried. I see the workers taking on so much more and thankful to boot, that they still have a job. They are tired though. I also could swear I see new workers in the grocery store and banks, and they appear to be more qualified. Maybe I am imagining this, that employers are merging, hiring and keeping only the best. I don’t know what to think of this but everyone is nicer to each other.

Small business owners have usually sunk all that they have in their business and watching them lose everything, their hopes and dreams, everything, is reason enough to spend whatever it takes. So, if people are saving just in case, think again and spend a little, tip more, and drop the “were doomed” attitude and see what Bing sees; we can, we will, and we are going to make it.

on a personal note, i lost my job in epidemiology, but found out i could make the same teaching high school science and demand is high for females teaching math, statistics and physics. i recently had a legal matter, so i had to refinance for cash. The refinancing rate actually saved me more money then I lost. (I thought of Bing’s article when i calculated the new mortgage rate and realized my luck.)

Thanks Bing, you made my life a little better by pointing out to look for the cracks of light!

Thank you, Laurel. And thanks to all of you, first time commenters, long-time bloviators, story-tellers, complainers, philosophers, cranks and wisenheimers, for making this space what it is, whatever it is. You’ve given me your thoughts on airline travel, recession, depression, incessant solicitations from Chase, the triumphs of Apple and, sometimes, Microsoft, Bernanke, Paulson, Madoff and other great symbols of high finance up to and including Mike the Headless Chicken and Alan Greenspan.

Right now it’s pretty unclear what the future holds. I hope, frankly, that it starts surprising us in a completely different way pretty soon. But either way, if it does or if it doesn’t, I’ll keep showing up if you do. And who knows. I may have a few surprises coming soon myself.

And Laurel? Send me an email to bingblog@gmail.com with your info. I’ll send you something nice.

If you take my money, you have to abide by my rules. Isn’t that what your parents always used to say when you were an unruly teenager? You can’t have that girl or boy in your room with the door closed. You can’t smoke in the house. You can’t have any contraband in your desk, even if you’re just holding it for a friend. And you can’t pay out billions of dollars in bonuses to your pals.

Oops, that last part just snuck in there. But the comparison is apt. These bad boys have taken a bunch of dough from the family kitty. This morning it looks like another $30 billion is going to prop up AIG, the guys who are supposed to be so thoughtful and austere that they are qualified to prop up the rest of us. And still the stories of business-as-usual in the largesse arena keep emerging. Recently Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, citing that enterprising source, TMZ, went off on one bank who had recently received a billion-dollar bundle from the Feds, only to turn around and hold its long-scheduled boondoggle in Los Angeles, featuring salmon, steak, and performances by Cheryl Crow and Chicago.

Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?

I have a simple idea to make sure they do. I suggest that part of the national plan for recovery should be the creation of a National Handout Controller. In corporate terms, this would be the guy who goes over the expense accounts of every person who works for firms that have received bailout money. I know there are probably offices that purport to do this right now. But the establishment of such a dedicated position would speak to the serious nature of the function.

You don’t have to be told how it works, not if you have an expense account and work for a company that has its head on straight. You go to dinner at a nice restaurant with a client and have a $300 bottle of wine. You get a call. What’s up with the wine? Wasn’t there a $100 bottle that would have impressed your companion just as much? You order Castle Wolfenstein for your cell phone, so you can kill Nazis while you wait for the next plane. You get a call. Sure, it’s only $2.99 a month, but it’s clearly personal. We don’t kill Nazis here. We make plastic hangers. And you take a $50,000,000 plane to Washington to ask for more money, every hour in the air costing thousands and thousands of dollars? Guess what. Next time, fly commercial. And you can pick up the tab for your lack of taste and judgment, too. That will be $50,000, please. The corporation will take a check.

We can sure use it.