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Economy
Menswear company Jos. A. Bank's promotion during these recession times.
Buy a suit now and if you’re fired by July 1, 2009, Bank will refund your money. You can keep the suit.
Relatedly, Jet Blue has been running a similar refund program for laid-off customers.
[Via]
This melting 1500 pound ice sculpture of the word "ECONOMY" was created by artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese and displayed near City Hall in downtown Manhattan on October 29, 2008 to commemorate the 79th anniversary of the '29 stock market crash. Although it might as well depict our current state of affairs.
[Via]
Mother Jones lists 10 people who have profited greatly from the current "global financial and economic crisis."
Jerry Haworth: Haworth is a relatively small-time hedge fund manager (his firm manages in the neighborhood of $40 million), but his "Black Swan Fund" made big-time profits over the past year, gaining 236 percent. The fund is named after NYU professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan theory, which warns of rare, hard-to-predict events that nonetheless have enormous impacts. The fund was "conceived and executed as a disaster hedge, and clearly last year was full of disasters" one fund investor told Bloomberg News. But Haworth announced in early March that he is closing down the Black Swan fund, because, he says, "The market has gone from underpricing risk to overpricing it." Instead, he'll be starting a fund that bets on increasing worldwide inflation.
Pitchforks! Torches! Just kidding. Jokes people, jokes. No need to hire bodyguards.
[Via]
Boston Globe's Big Picture has a photo gallery depicting the current economic "Great Recession."
Hotel property manager Paul Martinez kicks in a tenant's door after no one answered the knock during an eviction February 26, 2009 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The tenant said that he was laid off from his job in a retail store two months ago and had fallen behind on his rent payments at the low-budget hotel. (John Moore/Getty Images)
A RE/MAX Central bus advertises tours of foreclosed homes March 7, 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The real estate group began giving tours for prospective buyers three times a week in February 2008, in an effort to clear inventory of foreclosed properties. They have seen a steady decrease in foreclosure listings since the summer of 2008 in the Las Vegas area. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
Thousands of unemployed Chinese graduates flock to a job fair in Wuhan, central China's Hubei province on March 7, 2009. China vowed to help train one million graduates in the next three years to boost their qualifications, and promised loans to business that hire graduates, as unemployment continues to grow. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)
A scaled visualization of what one trillion dollars looks like in cash.
A stack of $10,000 in $100 bills.
Here's a million dollars worth of those $100 bills.
And here's one trillion dollars.
[Via - Thanks Tal!]
Tom Chiarella writing for Esquire explains his $20 theory of the universe, where a twenty "...placed in the right hand at the right moment, makes things happen. It gets you past the rope, beyond the door, into the secret files." Airports
On the plane, I approached the woman in seat 1A and held out a twenty. She asked if I was serious. I said yes. She took it and ran to 9B like her pants were on fire.
Cabstands
I could have stood in line at the airport cabstand for fifteen minutes like every other mook in the world, freezing my balls off, but such is not the way of the twenty-dollar millionaire. I walked straight to the front of the line and offered a woman twenty bucks for her spot. She took it with a shrug. Behind her, people crackled. "Hey! Ho!" they shouted.
Hotels
I always grease Bobby H., the bellman at my hotel, and on my first night, within minutes of the pass, he suggested that I might request a room upgrade. He even gave me a room number to ask for. Another twenty at the desk and I was out of two queens, snug in my one king. The next day, we ran the same drill, and wham, I was in the minisuite. The twenty after that, I was in a full suite with a view of Times Square.
Cafes
In my favorite midtown coffee shop, the Cafe Edison, they maintain VIP seating for a-holes like Neil Simon and August Wilson who supposedly come here to write. They keep the area roped off and generally empty, even at noon while a line stretches out the door. This has always pissed me off. So when I entered at noon one day, I folded a twenty, slipped it to the old lady at the counter, and she waved me into the VIP like she was whacking me with the back of her hand.
Bodegas
At 3:00 that very morning, I had called an Eighth Avenue bodega and told them I'd give them twenty dollars for a pint of milk and a Hustler magazine. The guy who answered the phone had a thick Arabic accent. "You are crazy," he said. ...Twenty minutes later, the guy was at my door with a quart of 2 percent and a shrink-wrapped valu-pack of three Hustlers. He sighed and smiled when I gave him the twenty.
Photoshops
"What do you wanna see?"
"You know," I said. "I want to see the file."
He picked up the twenty with two fingers and tucked it in his pocket. "I'll show you what I've got." He pulled a manila envelope from beneath the counter and took out four snapshots. The first three were simple bare asses--in a shower, at a kitchen sink, faceup on a couch. Beneath that was an enlargement of a cat licking a woman's nipple. Pretty cool, but hardly what I expected.
"That's it?" I said.
The guy pursed his lips. "That's all I've got this week. That stuff doesn't stay around here long. The master file would cost a lot more than twenty dollars."
Master file! Damn. Clearly, I had priced myself out of the good stuff by coming forward with the twenty too fast.
Etc
I bought my way into a good table at a Les Paul show with a twenty. I got an usher at NBC to hold a front-row seat for Busta Rhymes on the Carson Daly show. I got a seat at Dos Caminos, Manhattan's jumpingest Mexican restaurant, in five minutes despite the two-hour wait. I cut to the head of the line at the half-price Broadway ticket booth in Times Square. I got my shoes resoled in twenty minutes instead of two weeks. I got a little love by shoving a twenty into a homeless guy's coffee cup.
I imagine this tactic is even more influential in today's economic times.
[Via]
One of the richest men in the world German Adolf Merckle committed suicide last week after he lost a fortune getting caught in a 'short squeeze' that ultimately threatened to destroy his business empire. Merckle shorted the stocks of Volkswagen, that is betting VW stocks would fall. Instead, their stocks jumped in October from from below €200 to over €1000 per share making Volkswagen for a brief period the world's most valuable company. Merckle along with a whole slew of hedge funds who had shorted huge amounts of VW stock got killed (literally for Merckle...) thanks to Porsche.
On paper, Porsche made between €30-40 billion in the affair. Once all is said and done, the actual profit is closer to some €6-12 billion. To put those numbers in perspective, Porsche’s revenue for the whole year of 2006 was a bit over €7 billion.Porsche’s move took three years of careful maneuvering. It was darkly brilliant, a wealth transfer ingeniously conceived like few we’ve ever seen. Betting the right way, Porsche roiled the financial markets and took the hedge funds for a fortune.
Read rest of this fascinating story here.
[Via]
This is my super hero I created over at Marvel's Create Your Own Super Hero website.
Recently called out of retirement The Bailout last saw action during the 1930s. While his effectiveness during that depressing period is debated to this day as his rival the New Deal grabbed most of the headlines, The Bailout has reappeared for another go, this time against the evil Dr. Subprime Mortgage whose dastardly actions has led to global economic instability.
South Korea has been particularly shaken as the financial crisis has spread around the world. Recently the Korean government, led by president Lee Myung-bak, announced a $130 billion rescue plan. You know what else is happening in South Korea? Little known actress Han Chae-a made the cover of Maxim. GOOD for her.
The I.R.S. dangled the possibilities when it held an open house at the federal office building at 290 Broadway in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday. An hour before the fair was scheduled to begin, the crowd began lining up — recently laid-off Wall Street types in charcoal-gray pinstripe suits and trench coats; less formally dressed people; a woman with a new accounting degree on her résumé and a 14-month-old baby in a stroller."
"Part of the daily lineup outside the State Employment Service Office. Memphis, Tennessee. June 1938. Photographer: Dorothea Lange." [Via]
Following last week's steep decline, today the DJIA experienced "the biggest single-day percentage gain in 75 years" after "governments and central banks around the world mounted an aggressive, coordinated campaign to unlock the global flow of credit, an effort that investors said they had been waiting for."
Paul Krugman (now Nobel winner), on his blog, posted this cartoon which was published in The Economist in 1987, but it seems very relevant today in an attempt to rationally explain the heck is going with the financial markets.
Barack Obama announced today a new set of proposals to immediately address the current economic crisis.
For those Americans in danger of losing their homes, today I'm also proposing a three-month moratorium on foreclosures. If you are a bank or lender that is getting money from the rescue plan that passed Congress, and your customers are making a good-faith effort to make their mortgage payments and re-negotiate their mortgages, you will not be able to foreclose on their home for three months. We need to give people the breathing room they need to get back on their feet.
Read full text of his speech here.
Juxtaposition.
1. BrokersHandsOnTheirFacesBlog.tumblr.com
I'm a few days late on this story, but apparently someone punched and knocked out then Lehman CEO Dick Fuld at the company gym.
[Fuld] was on a treadmill with a heart monitor on. Someone was in the corner, pumping iron and he walked over and he knocked him out cold. And frankly after having watched this, I’d have done the same too.
Here's what I always immediately think of when someone gets knocked out:
Dammmnnnn.
[Via]
Does anyone want to take a crack at explaining this in one paragraph? You Don't Know Squat? Krunky Munky? Tsar? Jayev3ryday?
- Paul
Shameless Plug: If you don't know what Paul is referring to it is this great game called Line Rider that you can play for free on MySpace Games!
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