2009 – Another sour year?

So many predictions and so many negative out there, I recommend everybody should buy and read “Though time never last but tough people do” book by Robert H. Schuller.  What will happen during this 2009 year is unknown to all, but the prediction from top economists and business people are not good so far. Even Microsoft started lay off means a lot to our current state of economy.  A simple metaphor is Warren Buffet lost some money on bad investment, in order to make up, usually he would be asking some loan money from Bill Gates at some simple interest to reinvest, but now situation is Gates also run out of cash. The current situation is all the money vanished from every where, global investors, where it went is still a mystery?  

During the housing boom, investors were very positive about mortgage backed securities and they “recklessly” bought it and now all went underwater. The realism is we are heading to thoughtful investment cycle, in other words reckless, vacuous investors are out of scope now. They may not come to market for next 3-5 years. This is good for other investors, if we buy a house/stocks now, it reflects a real time price, and companies would extra careful to invest with projects. What ever we do now is very carefully planned and did some research. 

Most of us start worried/feared about job market, we should be because if one is not feared at this situation means they are dumb ("dumb enough to fearless" thanks to Outliers by Gladwell). But a job there for us, which perhaps not in our desire locations, may be we have to briefly separate from our family. Nowadays a temporary separation is not painful as before, thanks to Web 2.0 and video chat technology, 3G networks, frequent flyer program helps us to stay in touch with family regularly. I think 2009 is a year of recovery because of government’s intervention, but government process is a painful and slow, democratic process, but we will be up again as long as Mother Nature not turns us down. 

Ouch!!! Headline Hurts

Again today morning flashing headline was 533,000 jobs vanished in November month alone. And the revised job report for September, October also very deep. As soon as flash news showed in CNBC, as usual some of us pressed panic button and affected with negative emotions. This event is not new to us, we are experiencing this since 2007 summer. As I said before, don’t jump into conclusions by reading headlines. Yes, we are in trouble right now, and all government’s engine started fire to resolve it. Patience will prevail.  

Even though employers cut job for last one year, unemployment rate was holding up between 5% - 7%, I agree that anything above 5% is not good for developed nation like U.S, but because most of the people left job market to find an alternatives, some left for long vacation to explore the world. A piece of advise is this is good time to go back to school and enhance our skills. 

Here are the points I have here to justify that we are not in deep recession as media hyping. 

1. Last month job report suggests that we had job cuts ranging from mining industry to jet engine manufacturing. It is the clear indication that we are having a domino effect, that is, employers fear that credit market is frozen so they have to cut some expense to preserve cash. If that is the only reason, what will happen if government unfreeze credit market, will they hire all back? http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/business/economy/06jobs.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

2. I was under impression that this job report only includes adults, but after reading detailed report i found out that this includes teenagers also. Obviously they all went back to school, and the unemployment rate for teenagers is 20.4%, most of the cut come from temporary jobs. So before getting jump into conclusions, have this in mind and read detailed report. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

3. “Statisticalphobia”, I don’t know how to coin this but we are now affected by this new kind of phobia, all the numbered were compared with 30 years ago, 35 years ago and so on. 2-3 weeks ago, Steelers game ends with the score 11-10 and headline was, this is first time a football game ends with 11-10. why bragging about it? Steelers won and game ended, that’s all. The same happened now also, some one in press ran a query to found out when employer shed 533,000 jobs last time to hype about it. I like comparing situations but not this far apart. 35 years ago, German was not a single country, there was no European Union, USSR and U.S had cold wars, Larry didn’t invent Oracle database, Gates was at school and most of the web 2.0 CEOs and I was not even born ;-).http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081205/ap_on_bi_ge/financial_meltdown 

4.CNN.com, I believe they are most negative hype news organization, they just appended all negative things (as a year, as a month) into one and reported in there front page. See the headline…

“Lost: 1.9 million jobs

The 2008 tally soars after payrolls shrink by 533,000 in November, the biggest one-month decline in nearly 34 years. Unemployment soars to 6.7%.” 

 See the choice of words double “soars”, and just took all 2008 job lost in to account, we have one more report pending for 2008 as whole year. Why can’t they account for since 2000 or 1990, this is called manipulation of data to substantiate some specific objective.

I’m happy that most of the investors agree with me, they didn’t take media’s hype seriously, because market was not crashed today,matter of fact all indexs went up. As always market was already predicated this and now calm bull investors are busy with bargain shopping for both stocks and Christmas gifts for their dear ones.