First i titled “Are we dumber than our ancestors?” but i myself got offended by that, hence here is new title like Monsters Vs Aliens.
The way we advancing our innovation and technology are slowed down comparatively our grand father days. But definitely we are advancing a lot in equality and humanity front, which was lacked a lot in olden days. The innovation is slowed down because we are too fear to take risks, afraid of failures, lot of scrutiny, lack of competition, settle with less and too much concern about privacy, human right violation, animal cruelty etc.
The 20th century is golden era of innovation and technology advancement mainly because of Great Britain’s eager to expand their kingdom, German’s aggressiveness and finally cold war between U.S.A and U.S.S.R. At the end of cold war, we did rest our innovative mind and concentrated on peace and poverty abolishment.
But we should not settle with a fake peace and show-off poverty abolishment stance. We need a true peace and real way of world leaders to come together to try to abolish poverty and increase humanity etc. Research and innovation and technology is only one of unify our world and uplift humanity to next level, but we are lacking on that is main reason of concern. Last 20 years, major advancement we did was Computers, Information Technology, that’s it, we haven’t did anything other than Information Technology. All major expansion happened based on converting all process and machinery to information technology awareness products. Medical, Medicine, Space, Mechanical, Civil, Architecture, Agriculture and Physics, Healthcare we were not advanced but compromised with converting some of them into information technology. The same cancer finding scanner is used with high resolution but cure for cancer is not yet invented.
We are relying more on Western Europe, U.S.A and Japan to spend their resource and money for research and innovation and all others are just settled with service oriented industry. So research and innovation was monopolized and brain drained in those countries because people in advanced country try to settle with already existed technology, they may not want to advance now. For example, a 25 years old Japan youngster may spend lot of time to drive sports car rather than spending time with researching new battery turbo car engine. The point is, we all should be concentrate on research and innovation and make this world a better place to live.
As per my view, recession ends when oil price jumped to $45, we are not seeing price cooling off and second indication is gold price spiked above $900 and third indication is consistent home price/sales upward trend and forth indication is stock market keep on climbing north plus today’s important last hour bull ride. We are exactly at bottom and market positioned itself to stabilize and ready for right side of U within next couple of months. Now major worry is inflation and oil price, one of prediction is oil price would touch to $300 with in a year, that’s roughly $8.00 per gallon. This prediction should not happen but never know.
It was a excellent job of President Obama and his team, President Obama said at yesterday’s 60 mins that “Now--there's a potential silver-- silver lining, which may be that things are so accelerated now, the modern economy is so intertwined and-- and wired, that things happen really fast-- for ill, but things may recover faster than they have in the past.” that is exactly right, now we need more help to par with growth of economy.
But there are some caveats though, the final version is work in progress and people try to make it perfect and perfect as a result imperfect one would emerge. The best part of the plan is, private investors and banks going to decide the price and government will not interfere with the process hence we can expect a transparent price determination of toxic assets. For example, $100 worth of mortgage can be sell to $85 or $86, there is no one price for all bad assets. The remaining matters are too economical for me to comprehend but some banks that are already write down their assets are best place to capitalize the moment as per top economists.
As a Java developers, we don't care about Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) happening in market place, but today's IBM's acquisition talk of Sun Microsystems was really important. There are lot of questions about future of Java? it's open source status?? JCP process??? etc...etc...But as per my opinion, IBM did more than Sun did for Java, in fact IBM's developer's works has more document than Sun. IBM will not kill Java technology but questions regarding open source and JCP are unknowns for now. My opinion is, JCP should be continued and it was very transparent to all.
The main question is, what will happen to SUN JVM? Since IBM has it's own JVM, what is the point of continuing with SUN JVM. The issue with JVM is, the working application will not work if we change JVMs. For example, the working application from JBoss will not work in WebSphere, because the former is Sun JVM implementation and later is IBM JVM implementation. The main issues are the way different JVM handles classpath loading, constructor and object creation, garbage collection. Here is one closed bug from latest JBoss release's issue in IBM JDK. This kind of issues are very common when we change JVMs to different vendors. Most of the issues happen from outside of application boundary hence debugging and fixing is cumbersome. Here is excellent blog from Excelsior about different JVM's bahaviours .
Having said that, lets hope IBM will not change any thing for now, they can slowly mend it to their way of developing Java and it is future release. One way it is good that Java going to be with a strong company. Since last recession Sun didn't turn around their business positive so far, they are lossing money quater by quater and nothing seems to work fine for Sun. IBM is really great but one catch is they are very much into all level of IT business and it will be really interesting how they are going to handle a language which is used by millions of millions developers, mainly for open source projects. It is really a fundamental shift for IT market.
All eyes are towards Wall Street, how it is going to trade tomorrow and coming days are crucial for these gloomy economic times. Today’s Fed Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s optimistic interview he was very positive than before, he reaffirmed the recession could end in 2009, which is good news and all investors are closely watching this development. Actually now part of new tactics from Obama administration is, top officials are coming out and spreading positive news around media, which is good and they have to do it.
One more good news is, from OPEC that they are going to keep the output. The stability of oil price is really important during the pre-recovery period. Everybody thought OPEC going to cut production, but they exercised common sense at these tough times.
There are two key events changes the fundamentals of recession, A) stability of retail sales B) blame game and pointing finger started. Why these are really important, retail sales is really important because people start spending means they are now came out of recession mood and more importantly Obama’s big stimulus package start doing it’s magic now. The blame game towards CNBC and Jim Cramer is really good sign also. During last stage of earlier 2001-2003 recession, final moments, there were huge blame games started swirled around and lot of lawsuit filed at end of it. Now we just started it and will go on until this fall with wave of lawsuits.
Definitely bulls are out there but hid to come out because of continuous sober news from recession hit market place. Yesterday’s a simple memo from top bank official made the bulls out of hidden places. The bull market extended to world markets and today also. So the million dollar question is, are we out of woods? In my opinion, no we are not yet. Still some companies want to cut cost during Q2 and Q3 of 2009 and housing market is not finding enough buyers to stabilize market and foreclosure not yet completely done.
The top level, first line of investment professionals are out of woods for now, this is exactly happen when we are at bottom or close to bottom. First indication was, oil price didn’t touch psychological barrier of below $30 and bullish FOREX dollar value and gold price/U.S Treasury bond value up. These all are indication of bullish mood slowly returning to market. U.S employer’s cut almost 4.4 million jobs, if we use 20 jobs save 1 million calculations, U.S companies going to save $220 billions in coming quarter plus the various cost cutting could save other $200 billions. So future earning per share going to improve a lot, stocks will look like lot of cheaper and it will be viable option than Oil, Gold, and Treasury bond investment. We are all set for prolong bullish market from Q3 2009 and overall economy from Q1 2010.
But as Warren Buffet said don’t believe technical nowadays, it is very hard to plot future graph and predict this market. Jon Stewart taking direct hit with Jim Cramer about his predictions. But if we believe the same business contraction and expansion cycle pattern repeated 18 times since 1872 including 2 great world wars and great depression, what is difference at this time?
It took me two days to completely understand the essence of U2’s new album “No Line on the Horizon”. This is the U2’s ultimate album of their entire career. This album is higher than their most successful album “Achtung Baby”. The specialty of this album is a kind of mesmerism, excellent background music, high stretch Bono’s vocal and heartbreaking lyrics. Some songs (moment of Surrender, fez of born) are literally taking us to space, mood elevating. The anti-poverty band U2 and Bono’s central theme is no line on the horizon then why need line between countries. He is switching between east to west song sequence is brilliant to reveal his stance on peace, anti-war and anti-poverty.
No line on the horizon
First song of album, high stretch Bono’s vocal is a difference here. The started Eno’s magic with sound was made this song as a title song. Rock style is something different.
Magnificent
A typical U2 song. Probably hardcore U2 fans going to like this song much.
Moment of Surrender
What a mesmerizing song. It started with again rock style with church music. Lyrics and Bono’s vocal melody and background music is blended brilliantly for this song. My favorite song. The theme is “nothing can be taken granted", "big but yet vulnerable”.
Unknown Caller
Great typical U2 song.
I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight
Ambient music, Bono's vocal is high here. Great song to listen.
Get on Your Boots
Grammy's introduce song. A beautiful song.
Stand Up Comedy
A high spirited song. "Out from under your beds C’mon ye people stand up for your love". Great music also.
Fez – Being Born
Excellent song, another mesmerizing song. The starting music sequence mixed with some marketplace sound somewhere in Africa and music change over to eastern style, then a pause, finally a high note different mixed feeling music, then Bono’s vocal melody. What else we need to mesmerize us.
White as snow
A slow melody. seems to me a flashback song.
Breath
Another brilliant from Bono, it is something like pop-hip-hop mixed variety. Anti-war centric theme again.
Cedar of Lebanon
A slow melody, "Child drinking dirty water from the river bank. Soldier brings oranges he got out from a tank" lyrics describes Bono's anti-war stance.
Overall U2’s No Line on the Horizon is a quality and beautiful album ever produced by any band.
Good way to start March madness. Now it is time to buy and read “Even Buffet isn’t perfect”, he is one of the reasons to sink DOW below 7000 mark. AIG is other reason for today’s melt down, they lost 60 billion dollars during Q4 2008, which means they lost each day 652 million dollars (I did count on thanksgiving/xmas holidays and 92 day per Q4 calculation). This is really hurts, now AIG is 77% government organization, U.S tax payers has significant amount of stake on AIG. Actually Credit Default Swap is unregulated $60-40 trillion industry hence losses from AIG are not surprising and more to come. The U.S government should concentrate on AIG and Citigroup for now, they are the one required special attention.
DOW now trades below 7000 which is 1997 level and S&P trades at 1996 level. The positive point of view is, we have once in a life time opportunity to buy stocks at 11 years backdated price. Imagine that we are in a time machine and that takes us to 1997 to buy as much as possible backdated priced stock. But the question is, can we wait more? So the time machine takes us to back to 1992 or 1988 or even 1982. It is very hard to predict and it perhaps stops here. Any way, this is lucrative market for long timers, especially technology stocks are really trading at low level, they are taking hit just because of they are in U.S stock exchange.
The consensus is, DOW could go down to 6400 because of series of divided cut from blue chip companies. Actually we shouldn’t obsess with day by day market fluctuation. Stock markets are leading indicator of economy health for foreseeable future. Now market trades with Q3-Q4 of 2009 expectation, hence it is clear that recovery is not at sight during 2009. But as soon as, spring started/after tax period, we can see some bull market, get ready for firecrackers folks.
As a side note, tomorrow is U2’s new album “No Line on the Horizon” release, enjoy the songs.
Now we are all talking about when would U.S and world economy turns around, some predictions are end of 2009, some 2010 and so on. What would happen economy never rebounds? In other words what will happen if we are heading to prolong global wide recession for next 10 years. Here are some thoughts
1. Protectionism
Obviously protectionism supporter’s voice grows stronger than ever. World Trade Organization may not have control over world’s trade. All nations lean towards protectionism and they choose their own way of doing business with greater consideration of local job creations and localized political gains.
2. Poverty
Poverty rate grows at exponential rate in Africa and some parts of Asia, which leads civil wars and change of world map. The charity work will virtually stop.
3. Cultural Changes
This prolong recession will help some cultural changes in some countries. To run family with normal means, all of the family members have to work. Man always wins bread concept will eliminate from most of the culture.
4. Revolution
We haven’t seen a rule changing and fundamental constitution change revolutions around the world for last 60-50 years. Now we could see some revolution from some countries.
5. Stock indices
Around the world stock indices trade with low index values, but some time it spikes and then come down to low index.Stock investment may not be a good option for investors, they continue to invest in gold, silver and other metals.
6. Aged Population
Developed nations will face it is growing unemployed aging population. Senior citizen care will be a great deal of concern. The ratio between senior citizen and others will decrease. Due to protectionism, immigration will not offset the ratio either.
These are all worst case scenarios, this will not even happen because U.S and world economy are resilient and come back sooner than later.
