How much of this is driven by fewer failed banks and how much is driven by the FDIC inability to deal with big failed banks?
And do these bank failure data include WaMu and Wachovia?
Due to FDIC gaurentees we don't run to the bank anymore.
If all depositors went to a failing bank and removed funds, there would be many more "failed" banks. The reserve amounts would plumet.
What happens when Chase pisses off enough people that they remove thier accounts? Checking, savings, CDs, brokerage etc. And why are we not that angry? Is it because moving funds is a hassle and all the other banks are just as bad?
creditcriminalslovetarp (profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 9:44 am
reply ignore user
update....watson back in the lead..tough shot out of old divot on 16....
reading last nights thread...never thought I would see CR turn into a marriage-women bashing gig....
Looks like it was another failed Saturday night and time to blame everyone besides yourself sort of thread.
@josap
I got annoyed at the monthly fee BOA was charging on a 30 year old account so I went across the street and opened a new account at another bank. A few days later I went in to deposit a local check and was told there would be a five day hold.
So I went back to BOA and got the fee eliminated. I had no idea I was getting special treatment because of the age of the account.
This is kind of meaningless in and of itself. Is there any way to normalise to the total number of banks during the periods in question, and the proportion of the total banking deposits that the failed ones individually controlled?
1 big bank failing is different to 100 micro ones etc., etc.
this doesn't look so bad. what are so upset, again? oh yeah. we're upset over the criminality of tbtf and over the banks capture of our government. note, however, that joe six pack doesn't give a sh** about these things. so long as things seem copacetic at the shopping mall and on tv, he doesn't care.
was it the age of the account or the fact that you took your money elsewhere?
The bank I use have removed fees and made some nice offers to keep my business accounts. And this was without me threatening to leave, just callling and being upset about a new fee they tried to slip in. The new fee was a "deposit cash" fee. Well, they are a bank, banks take cash! I was really angry.
I'm not much into burning bridges and keep little money in the account. I had not said anything to BOA about moving. It had never even occurred to me that immediate credit for most deposits was something special.
Lowering credit limits without real cause.
Increasing minimum payments that then cause people to default.
Adding fees at will.
Increasing fees at will.
Not lending to people with good credit and hording my tax dollars that were given without my consent.
Probably more things.
solar path - from the previous thread - Is CIT not eligible for TLGP and CPFF? As a bank holding company, I would expect them to be able to tap into government-backed cheap funding, no?
mos, yes I see it taking years to bring down small community banks. I found not to let my bank know what I was doing by going almost entirely cash. In my mailbox I found a brochure from my local bank saying come in, we will make you loans from 100.00 dollars up for less than anyother financial institution. Since I'm the only other business in town that makes small loans I knew they had looked at my accounts. I had already looked at the age of their employee's and the amount of what their payroll must be and knew without turning out money making loans they could'nt survive. Two months later their manager was gone and the loan sec. had been promoted to manager while the bank teller was now Asst. Manager with only part time help. Within the last two years they had dropped from 10 employee's to now two.
Just two years ago this same bank was telling customers it cost to much to process loans under 500.00 dollars and there just wasn't a market for it.,yet, here let me give you a cc with a 5000k limit which should tie you over. I' m saying they are trying every trick in the book to get lean to be bought out, before the sh##t hits the fan.
boa is a n c bank as is wachovia(walk over you) and bbt and you have to watch them a hawk. they are seriously evil. i really think that is why nations(or nc nb) took bank of america's name.
ll, it's probably illegal for you to sell booze. albeit a great idea, the problems you would have with the local sherriff diminish liquor's utility as a store of value. personal consumption aside, of course.
Poic- yeah...I think you ment'd your wife is chinese, my gf is too..most of the commenters last night are clueless on women, yet not so on economy...they should stick with economic matters...
I've got an apocalypse/ retirement liquor stash.
Up to four or five cases of fifths now...
Mostly whiskey, but some bourbon, vodka and rum.
Don't want the ammo stash getting lonely.
Missed the thread last night...
Was Lucifer carrying on again?
OT: Rail volume. Not as bad as this spring but for a few nagging issues: "Intermodal volume of 176,887 trailers or containers was down 23.7 percent from the same week last year. Container volume fell 19.4 percent and trailer volume dropped 40.3 percent. Total volume on U.S. railroads for the week ending July 11 was estimated at 28 billion ton-miles, off 16.9 percent from the same week last year.
All 19 carload freight commodity groups were down from last year, with declines ranging from 4.2 percent for the catch-all category labeled “all other carloads” to 58.4 percent for metals and metal products." [emphasis added]
60% less than last year's metal products moving around the country is the mother of all leading indicators.
This is nothing compared to the S&L crisis. There were 28 weeks during the S&L crisis when regulators closed 10 or more banks, and the peak was April 20, 1998 with 60 bank closures...
1998? Peak Bank Failure? But those were the Clinton Years, and everyone knows the Clinton Years were blissfully awesome, and life didn't start to suck until Bush got elected.
CIT's application to the TLGP hasn't been approved (not rejected either) as the FDIC has serious concerns over its books. In any event, the window is pretty much closed as FDIC has already began phasing out the program. It had been set to close at the end of Q2, but has been extended to 10/31/09. If IIRC, CIT has issued CP to the CPFF, however, the limit for the facility is the maximum amount outstanding between the dates 1/1/08-8/31/08. My guess is that, because of CIT's business model, very little of its funding had been based on CP, so that the CPFF doesn't provide much of a lifeline.
My sister works for a large paper mill / manufacturer. They make napkins, toilet paper, paper towels. Mostly for fastfood, hotels, commercial accounts.
Last year they shipped avg 28 semi truck loads a day, this year 4 trucks a day.
They use recyled goods and can now get all the cardboard boxes free, if they go get them.
Simon Johnson comments on the NYTimes piece I linked to in the previous thread and mentions that he believes Summers is running for the Fed chair Summers has an unparalleled ability to move the consensus. And if he is now running from the left to become chair of the Fed – which was my impression on Friday – this will shift all candidates, including Ben Bernanke, towards being tougher on banks.
What is everyone's take on the conspiracy rumors that big banks are using front-running/packet sniffing/high frequency trading to prop up the equities markets?
As someone who has worked in Wall Street I.T., I find this stuff almost silly because IT usually can just barely keep the systems up and running for what they were intended to do, yet alone repurposed for market propping actions.
Then again I think equities are artificially defying gravity. But I don't think a conspiracy is required for that...
edit: zerohedge seems to be the source of a lot of this crap.
On the CIT thing, there was an article in the LATimes saying that the LA rag business uses CIT as their factor.
High-end rags are one of the last traditional sweatshop businesses left in LA.
They are mostly pretty marginal, so no surprise that they are heavily factored.
There used to be one here in SM that I knew of, but they got chased out of town when the commercial rents skyrocketed during the dot.bomb.
From the last thread....I sell IT equipment to county and city governement. It is going to be one tough year. All my customers are cutting way back. I have some customers who say they wont get anything for years. I also heard that the stimulus money is only being spent saving government jobs. I guess Obama was right. He may be saving jobs.
That triggered a recollection/pet peeve for me. Back when I used to drive more, I would occasionally stop at the clown to get a quick meal, and they would always hand me the drink without a bag. I would always have to ask for a bag so that the drink would not leak on the upholstery. Thinking back, it's just Ralston Purina in the Box that did that, it was all of them.
"Due to FDIC gaurentees we don't run to the bank anymore"
When Volcker said the ATM is the most important financial innovation of our time I wonder if he was thinking of daily withdrawal limits. ATMs would be the first line of defense in a bank run or holiday..
OkieLawyer (homepage, profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 10:41 am
I think this is a better website to track rail freight:
Railfax
And things look just as bad there.
Railfax is quoted here weekly better for most things agreed. I used the rail association to break out the metal and metal products sector. Mentioned above is also the paper and lumber products sector. You can't give cardboard away these days.
There are many things we can do without, TP is not one of them.
Many of us are old enough to remember a time before plastic trash bags. Other items we now think of as everyday normal, TP has always been there. Like air LOL.
tim, i have watched both of those sites post predictions of market plunge, gs troubles, bond market meltdown, incorrect technical analyses and narratives for months, now... none of which have come to pass. hard for me to take them all that seriously. boy that cried wolf and all.
The Romans used sponges. I guess slaves washed them out.
Oh, a fascinating tax fact. The Emperor Vespasianus, who counts as
one of the very good ones, taxed urine. Used (after it turns to amnonia, I
guess in the public laudries. The Romans had cold cream, but never, to
my knowledge, had soap.
I sell IT equipment to county and city governement. It is going to be one tough year.
IT boom is over.
It ended in the 2001 Crash, really.
In 2005, I predicted a continued decline at DEFCON in Vegas but I doubt even 5% of the audience understood my point.
There won't be a recovery.
It's about declining marginal utility of information.
I'd guesstimate that 90% of these will fail in the next 3-4 years.
It's a saturated market, saturated by attention bandwidth.
Tim, yes, we're living the IT equivalent of 1893-1896 which was the final gasp of the railroad boom.
The railroads still continued on and still grew but at a much slower pace and eventually shed about 30% of their employment.
Every time I vote for polls to be banished I get told, "Validation error, please try again. If this error persists, please contact the site administrator". Did Ken contract out to Diebold for the voting code?
tim, sure. but the better analysts at least acknowledge the futility of prediction. that is why i like cr. he posts data and observations and only offers long-range predictions that at least come with some caveats. the others now appear to me to be talking their books.
About 100 years ago, a miner from Alaska sent $5 to Sears, in Chicago, for a supply of toilet paper. They sent the money back, saying he needed to order from the catalog. He rplied, "If I had the catalog, I wouldn't need the toilet paper".
HollywoodHack (homepage, profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 11:22 am
CHP vs LA county sherrifs? now THAT would be entertaining.
i really wonder which part of 'blood from a stone' they don't get... or, perhaps, 'water from the salton' is a more californian version...
broward great analogy to the railroads. I heard it compared to the railroads ten years ago. They mentioned that Japan never built heavy rail and even today can't move cargo. I thhink the US lacks heavy rail broadband and always will.
Also about SEA startups. How many of these try to emulate facebooks money losing model?
are you basing your analysis on the slowdown (to near halt) of real technological innovation/advancement in the it sector, thus resulting in decreased demand for new it investment (maintenance mode only). or, are you speaking only of the it labor market as local resources are supplanted by india? fwiw, i don't see a replacement for current corporate it infrastructures on even a mid-term horizon.
"Besides spending cuts, the budget proposal includes capturing more than $4 billion from cities, counties and special districts.
It also relies on accounting tricks, such as increasing income tax withholding schedules by 10 percent to shift money from 2010-11 to 2009-10, as well as delaying state worker paychecks next June 30 to July 1."
He continued "Gil wasn't always an asshole. He just hasn't adjusted well to not having any money." As an aside he added "A lot of us haven't."
Max nodded "Yep. It's been rough."
This was what Max was good at. Talking to people. He could project a strong, nonjudgmental, and caring attitude at the flick of a switch. People ate it up. Especially scared ones.
Old Guy paused. Even I knew he had something he wanted to say. You could tell he was trying to control both the flow of his words and the naked need in what he was going to say. He almost did too. "Well, I am a pretty good operator. I learned in the SeaBees way back when. And, well, I could use some work and..." Here he stopped. His hands were on top of the table. They looked old, brown, ropey, and scarred. No wedding ring either.
How many of these try to emulate facebooks money losing model?
I only looked five or six but if you look at the rankings by SSI reach, you get a quick idea of what's viable.
Zillow tops the index.
The financial fraud was possible because most people chose not to understand a complicated system.
I think there's a similar fraud in the advertising rankings which will shake out in the next couple of years.
are you basing your analysis on the slowdown (to near halt) of real technological innovation/advancement in the it sector
I'm basing it on people and the previous boom.
They'll only spend so much time reading.
The shakeout right now is in newpapers.
The initial boom was a granular interactive environment displacing a coarse push-only environment (television, newspapers) so there was a lot of growth. The next wave of growth will be much more difficult because there's no old, feeble prey to feed upon. The leverage of existing frameworks is much larger, you need fewer people to accomplish the same task.
broward (homepage, profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 2:19 pm
It's a saturated market, saturated by attention bandwidth.
Not just bandwidth. On the hardware side, it's an issue of commoditization.
I have a potentially very lucrative gig right now. i drew up my hardware upgrade list. It includes a dual-core desktop with a terabyte drive (MSI Nettop 100) and a laptop with a 10+ hour battery life (EEE seashell 1005HA-H).
It runs less than 700 bucks. I could buy stuff that's beefier, but it'd be performance for its own sake. Even if I buy a hellacious new monitor to go with them, it'll be under a grand. All of them will be running a free OS.
The new is off, this is a commoditized product being priced accordingly.
Agree.
After using Drupal for a couple of weeks, I see how someone with a medium skill level could create 50 websites per year.
How many websites do you need?
It's going to look like the agriculture market, 2% of the population creating all the infrastructure & content.
Help Wanted signs at banks are a thing of the past (Help Wanted sign are also in general, a thing of the past):
A report issued Friday by the Employment Development Department in Sacramento also hints at how the state budget deficit will affect California, which lost 6,700 government jobs in June.
"That's the tip of the iceberg," said Stephen Levy with the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto. California lost 66,500 jobs in June
"It runs less than 700 bucks. I could buy stuff that's beefier, but it'd be performance for its own sake. Even if I buy a hellacious new monitor to go with them, it'll be under a grand."
I don't know about you, but for me performance is still an issue. Each new generation is snappier than the last, but I want millisecond responsiveness, sub 5 second boot time, etc. And a really nice monitor is still almost $2K, although you can get pretty good ones for under $1K now.
On bandwidth, the last mile problem is still a major issue for me. I want 100Mb/s up and down for under $100/month.
OT, a great summation of the worthless corporate-owned media of this country (and why most of us are spending our time on CR and other blogs): Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
In the various computing equipment paradigms, the threat has always come from below - from the smaller, simpler device. Already, SmartPhones are co-opting end-user computing tasks. I suspect the desktop computer will be a relic in 5 years or less, and with it, INTC/MSFT's margins.
Optimism is waning: looking at a slow summer and an anemic fall recovery
Moving into the second half of what will surely remain a dismal year, the consensus calls for a third
quarter that might, at best, avoid further contraction in the U.S. economy. http://www.conference-board.org/pdf_free/economics/2009_07_15.pdf
Constrained availability, higher cost, and uncertainties about the quality of
capital will slowly begin to eat into potential output growth, as cutbacks in physical, human, and other
intangible capital continue, and the economy moves onto a slower growth path that will continue
through 2010 and possibly beyond.
broward (homepage, profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 2:41 pm
Agree.
After using Drupal for a couple of weeks, I see how someone with a medium skill level could create 50 websites per year.
How many websites do you need?
Coming to game design too. Check out Battle For Wesnoth's scripting engine.
Maury the Credit Responsibility Panda (profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 2:50 pm
I suspect the desktop computer will be a relic in 5 years or less, and with it, INTC/MSFT's margins.
I'm buying mine with the assumption it will mostly be a remote drayhorse used at network distances. i don't see them as having much future outside of being a sophisticated headless network appliance.
As someone who has worked in Wall Street I.T., I find this stuff almost silly because IT usually can just barely keep the systems up and running for what they were intended to do
<
p>Dont take this personally, but theres a reason you used the past tense referring to your employment in Wall St. IT. When IT is done right, its works... period. Its not any more correct to apply your limited experiences with IT across the whole industry, than the way Lucifer paints all women with the same broad strokes.
<
p>Its more than plausible for such an operation to be running smoothly, in fact Id be surprised if it wasnt. As you no doubt know since you 'worked in IT', MOST if not ALL problems in IT come from a User->Machine communication. Machine->Machine communication can do amazing things thousands of times a second, correctly, every time. Wall St. IT isnt bush league small office stuff, its the 'big show' so to speak. And quite frankly, your perception of IT itself being the weak link, and not the users, is probably why you arent using the present tense in your description of your employment with Wall St. IT.
<
p>Again, Im not trying to attack you personally, but the attitudes you have for the industry you are supposed to be working in, is one Id expect to see more form an end-user, not a engineer. Are you aware you are blaming inanimate machines, whos only purpose is to take your instructions, for the problems in IT? Has it ever occurred to you that the flaw might lie in your methods of instructing those machines what to do? Come on, you are supposedly in IT, its your JOB to troubleshoot problems and find the correct solutions. Sometimes the hardest problems to see are the ones you dont want to, especially when the ego gets in the way.
<
p>Or, as a poster wiser than me, on this very board said a few threads back;
"One day you will live to be old enough to understand, until then enjoy the stupor"
That's one reason I stopped spending time on programming/infrastructure stuff in 2005 and spent more time on the data-mining.
One boom area will be AI in specialized fields like medical diagnosis.
One of our vendors did a demo last year of a semantic analysis engine which was stunning to anyone who knows what's under the hood. The average observer was bored, though. Essentially, it parsed through hundreds of web pages during a few weeks and FIGURED OUT that "Denver" was a city, based solely on semantic context in articles. It wasn't programmed to use DENVER == city, it figured it out from how other people spoke about Denver. Amazing stuff.
I don't think the accusation is that the IBs are packet-sniffing, or in any way seeing the trades before they hit the NYSE's servers. IBs are allowed to co-locate their servers at the NYSE, with the exchange's complicity. They can take advantage of packet latency to front-run trades done from outside the exchange. It may or may not be propping NYSE stocks up, but the goal is to poach trades originating from the west coast.
SEC should combat it with a simple rule - bid and ask have to stand for a minimum of 1 second.
Agreed. Third-generation applications. Lots of stuff to do, especially now that it's possible to build reliable systems at a lower price point. RevolutionWIllNotBeTelevised had a point about reliability. Systems are now powerful enough to do much better on the UI side, so another challenge is idiot-proof UIs. There is no reason that the user of an email client should have to know about smtp port numbers and PKI certificates in order to configure their software, for example.
Don't know about the conspiracy theories but there are financial trading companies that exist solely to be quicker than others. A friend of mine joined a startup in NYC a few months ago. He sits in front of 9 screens and watches how quickly data comes in, out and gets processed. That's the life of this year's MBA graduates. Glad it's not me, I'd rather shoot myself in the head, but it does make him money.
sm_landlord (profile) wrote (in reply to...) on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 2:47 pm
But then, I'm hard to please.
You are, and it's an ever-shrinking segment of the marketplace. I have a 19" flat screen monitor bought 5 years ago for like, 250 bucks or 300 bucks, and it's just fine, no smearing, crisp display.
It's really adequate to my needs and the only reason I'll get a new one is we're moving the 360 to the family room and I want a widescreen display that's all nice and big for showpiece use.
I feel I'm pretty representative -- I'm technically adept and I feel very well-served by the current generation of hardware, even at the low end.
Maury the Credit Responsibility Panda (profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 3:02 pm replyIgnore userI don't think the accusation is that the IBs are packet-sniffing, or in any way seeing the trades before they hit the NYSE's servers. IBs are allowed to co-locate their servers at the NYSE, with the exchange's complicity. They can take advantage of packet latency to front-run trades done from outside the exchange. It may or may not be propping NYSE stocks up, but the goal is to poach trades originating from the west coast
Twodifferent issues. packet-sniffing and propping up markets. Propping up the markets part is the belief that HFPT are trading with each other in the same direction with basically the same risk avoidance, no diversity.
Systems are now powerful enough to do much better on the UI side, so another challenge is idiot-proof UIs.
Not happening. Even MS, with it's lock on most corporate desktops and corporate applications, can't make interfaces consistent, much less idiot proof.
It's more realistic to push the configuation up the IT food chain into the hands of the system admins. The tools exist, but you need trained and motivated admins to use them.
Propping up the markets part is the belief that HFPT are trading with each other in the same direction with basically the same risk avoidance, no diversity.
And I think that's very plausible, with program trading being such a large percentage of the exchanges' volume. Never something you can prove.
"You don't need an army of programmers, you need one PhD in statistics and one PhD in language."
I would broaden that to say you need a few domain experts that can code, a systems/network guy/gal, and maybe a systems programmer for any down&dirty stuff you hit, like device interfaces.
For non-trivial projects, it's helpful to have an architect to keep the domain experts from making stupid architectural mistakes. Otherwise, you frequently end up having to re-write big chunks to get the performance you need.
Designing the Obvious is a book with some good user interface ideas. I also find Paul Graham's essays have a lot of useful insight into creating systems.
you frequently end up having to re-write big chunks to get the performance you need.
This is an issue I've heard over and over again in interviews. The larger companies that coded for performance almost uniformly want to switch to hardware-focus and rewrite their codebase to standards, and the newer companies without experience still talk about "coding for performance". I've concluded that performance is a hardware issue, you code to a standard, predictable structure and tweak performance with hardware.
Liz - sounds like you read Lindsey Davis - one of my favorite authors - I made myself a couple of Vespasian denarius earrings last year. Have you read any of the Gordianus the Finder series by Steven Saylor? Also recommended.
we're living the IT equivalent of 1893-1896 which was the final gasp of the railroad boom. The railroads still continued on and still grew but at a much slower pace and eventually shed about 30% of their employment.
And once that cyclicality bit got flipped, it never unflipped in the next 115 years and now they trade at a PE of 4.
That's one way of looking at the Nazcrash - as a cyclicality bit-flipping.
broward (homepage, profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 12:23 pm
The larger companies that coded for performance almost uniformly want to switch to hardware-focus and rewrite their codebase to standards, and the newer companies without experience still talk about "coding for performance". I've concluded that performance is a hardware issue, you code to a standard, predictable structure and tweak performance with hardware.
A lamentable and inevitable consequence of lazy CISC winning out over disciplined RISC architectures.
Since the thread is concentrating on IT I'd like to ask you a somewhat vague question. I thought I read somewhere on your website that companies were using IT to push knowledge down to the lower/lowest level workers. From what I've seen recently, knowledge/thinking is being removed from the lowest levels and being replaced with computer automation. At my last job(mortgage payoff processing) the computer based systems were so advanced that humans were out of the loop entirely, or had turned the remaining workers into ants in a click farm.
Do you mean the process is being automated more and more, or that the lower level workers are being given more information?
A lamentable and inevitable consequence of lazy CISC winning out over disciplined RISC architectures.
Like so many things, I see it as an ego issue now.
You've got many young guys who like to code.
So they do what they want, not what's best for the team or long-term future of the company.
El Cliffo,
From the article: "The Fed's doctrine – New Keynesian Synthesis – has let it down time and again in this long saga, and there is scant evidence that Fed officials recognise the fact."
"I've concluded that performance is a hardware issue, you code to a standard, predictable structure and tweak performance with hardware."
That doesn't always work. An example I looked at two years ago: Domain experts write a web app, and it demos great. Customers line up to pay. Turns out an eight-server cluster won't support more than 100 users - oops. No money to re-code it properly, so the product died a lonely death.
Do you mean the process is being automated more and more,
I don't remember writing anything about that but from my experience what's happening is that the leverage of existing workers is being increased so that their total number can be decreased. For example, we did a mobile roadside system. The previous paper system required hundreds of data entry clerks, they had over one hundred in Texas alone. There's a couple now left that do simple edit checks on exceptions. I figure it was a reduction of 90%. That was my first experience with destroying the jobs of other people, it was a disturbing realization.
Likewise, we did a sales ordering application to serve perhaps 1000 sales people.
I suspect that about half those people are gone now.
You've got many young guys who like to code. So they do what they want, not what's best for the team or long-term future of the company.
I support a commercial database server product. One story from about 5 years ago... 2 of our guys published an ACM paper on a new hashing algorithm that offered a substantial performance improvement. We spent an entire release cycle rolling it out into all of our products. It turned out to be as fragile as a glass goblin in a multithreaded environment under stress, so support frequently wound up having customers. Knowing exactly how this would work out, support requested a configuration knob that would allow us to disable it.
broward (homepage, profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 12:30 pm
[ CISC winning out over RISC]
Like so many things, I see it as an ego issue now.
You've got many young guys who like to code.
So they do what they want, not what's best for the team or long-term future of the company.
Yeah, any drone can organize 80 operations to do a job the right way. But, but with 400 possible and subtle choices... then creativity can come into play. Just what we need, clever mission critical software. Not.
T-shirt seen on campus at the other Cambridge, MA school many, many years ago; "Turing Was Verbose".
When I walked into my BOA branch recently and used the new ATM that scans checks you are depositing front and back, reads the amount, gives you a total and prints a receipt with copies of the check on it, I couldn't thinking the tellers had best be looking for new jobs real soon.
HollywoodHack (homepage, profile) wrote (in reply to...) on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 3:40 pm
why folks like to bash one of only 3 or 4 export industries we have left, and one of the ones with better margins, i know not...
Because it's a dinosaur in search of a tar pit, and something about it turns the people who do it into soul-damaged mutants. It's capital intensive in the same way the music industry was, just on a larger scale, and in the next 20-30 years, it will also be something you do on a laptop in your bedroom, just like making release quality albums.
Here's a scary thought. Think of EBAY. For EBAY to work, everybody needs to know about EBAY, they need to read EBAY, they need to list items on EBAY and participate in bidding.
Imagine if you had a system which could roughly predict when you wanted to sell your car, from changes in your schedule, income, status. And that system communicated with other systems acting as a proxy for billions of other people. Those systems could list items, find buyers, negotiate price, all with no human intervention.
with all this doom and gloom about IT, should a network admin be concerned about his/her future? I get the sense that future salaries will be trending lower...
also with all this cloud computing talk, will there even be much of a need for IT if most of it can be hosted these days?
It was an awful design. But that's what you sometimes get when you let domain experts write code unsupervised. After all, they are domain experts, not code experts.
Tell a politician about a problem and he or she will derive a way government can fix it. Tell a Wall Streeter about a problem and he or she will derive a way to profit from it.
The problem with problems is sometimes solutions become worse problems than the original problems.
with all this doom and gloom about IT, should a network admin be concerned about his/her future? I get the sense that future salaries will be trending lower...
also with all this cloud computing talk, will there even be much of a need for IT if most of it can be hosted these days?
Someone still has to run the cloud and the network connections to the cloud. And since you're going to have legacy systems that you can't push onto the cloud you need a few legacy admins.
Of course all these systems can be managed more or less from India.
Turns out an eight-server cluster won't support more than 100 users
Do you possibly have any more details about that? Ive seen some pretty sh**ty managed hosting in my days, so it might not have been the app itself, as much as the hosting company.
One recent example that comes to mind was of a client using 'Comapny A' for managed hosting. When client signed up with 'Company A', the managed hosting plan was using a Veritas backup solutiuon across all the servers. Later 'Company A' decides to switch to a backup solution from IBM, Tivoli to be exact. The backups went form finishing in a matter of hours under Veritas, to sometimes not finishing in a 24-hr cycle. You can guess how fun it then was when the next daily scheduled backup came, and the previous one was still running.
Im not saying that was a similar situation, but you cant always blame the developers. Problems can pop up anywhere, and everywhere.
"we are busily exporting large parts of the industry. "
not too sure about that - the US and Japan tend to keep their flagship development at home in terms of interactive entertainment, and the world overseas still has a strong appetite for big, stupid american blockbusters, and doesn't often succeed in making them.
Looks like HH is getting a real earful from the rest of America. Everything that can be subbed and outsourced has left the industry in the same position as Chrysler and GM.
"Do you possibly have any more details about that?"
Without going into great detail, the basic problem was a database bottleneck. The database was not normalized, each web page generated hundreds of database accesses, each of which hit several tables, brute force searches, etc, etc. They had no idea how to deal with a database.
They also got hacked multiple times, but that was probably the "coder's" fault too, not the host.
That's a frightening story about the backups, though.
Digital restoration, animation, "dimensionalization", dubbing, subtitling/captioning, anything that is labor-intensive and can be done at a distance. Color correction is probably next as bandwidth improves.
true, but that still leaves the fun stuff here. i'd also note that most of what you mention is almost entirely found in film/tv, not so much in interactive or live entertainment.
For California, this was the 8th failure this year with total 13 banks fails since 2008.
Of this 13 failures , 8 banks were with the assets of more than $1 billion. 4 medium sized banks with assets between $100 million and $1 billion. And only 1 small bank with assets less than $100 million.
For Georgia, 1 bank failed this Friday , taking total to 15 since 2008 and 11th bank failure this year.
Of this 15 failures, 2 banks were with the assets of more than $1 billion. 13 medium sized banks with assets between $100 million and $1 billion.
For South Dakota, the failure of Alerus Financial, N.A. was the first one after First Federal Savings Bank of South Dakota, Rapid City was closed by FDIC on on April 24, 1992. List & Map if Failed Banks in South Dakota
Allen C (profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 6:47 pm
Some reporting suggestions (not a complaint)
Inflation-adjusted failed assets
Failed assets as % of total banking assets
I agree. We really need to look at this in terms of assets to take into account changing market structure/concentration. Number of banks is pretty irrelevant from an historical point of view.
It's fairly easy to pull down total assets and total deposits and then use the GDP deflator to come up with real deposits and assets at defaulted institutions. Why this blog post would instead refer to a meaningless count of failed institutions is beyond me. The top 25 years for # of failures, deposits, and assets are (probably poorly reproduced) below:
European & American state aid is interlocked into the International Bank of Settlements, which is tied to World Bank, which is tied into the IMF, which is like all things: Tied into Goldman Sachs!
AIG is run by Edley of Goldman Sachs!
All roads lead to: Goldman Sachs!
Why don't sheeple want to be independent of Goldman Sachs & JP Morgan?
Instead their lives are dictated to by a bunch of arbitrage wielding sycophants & sociopathic criminals who profit by destroying the system!
Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs & Treasury Sec under Bush, "I never saw the banking industry so strong", is involved in Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Geithner & Robert Rubens (also of Goldman Sachs & who was paid 150 million to run Citigroup into the ground) & the privately owned FED Res Bank & other banking oligarchs.
These oligarchs torpedoed pensions to create the new peasant class of indentured servants without medical, retirement or savings, (with the FED tripling money supply in 6 mos inflation is astronomical & wiping out savings)
Actual words: In my 35yrs banking is flourishing and has never been as sound as it is today!
Geithner, who has been wrong about everything for 15 straight years, also former President of the illegal privately owned NY Fed Reserve, convinced Clinton that counterfeit derivatives were a solution & thereby created the Community Reinf Act, its enhancement in 95’ under Clinton; ending the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act; and raised banking Capital to Debt ratios from 1:12 to 1:33!
As of April, Banks are now allowed to hide their true Net Worth, (eg. Mark the Model method enabled Citigroup, Wells Fargo, to post a billion dollar gain when it is sitting on many billions in losses); expect accounting fraud to blow up at an ever increasing tempo!
Right now Citigroup is “buying” its own debt, and booking it as a profit, (just like the Federal Reserve Bank & US Treasury department selling debt to each other). The bank bailouts are like an arsonist getting bailed out with charcoal & lighter fluid! Expect deluded bible-thumping idiots to continue buying their stock.
Currently, the world is forming ad-hoc currency baskets for trade in order to get away from the contamination, which is the US dollar, (google: Shanghai Organizational Coop); & setting up for a new World Order Currency
Meanwhile, the USA has “Stockholm Syndrome”, where the terrorized population through Obama actually supports their terrorist: Last week Obama is actually giving more power to their captors, the Federal Reserve Bank, rather than prosecuting them
Bernanke, Geithner, Rubens, Summers, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan & the Federal Reserve Bank know exactly what they are doing by collapsing the US Dollar:
"The purpose of this financial crisis is to take down the U.S. dollar as the stable datum of planetary finance and, in the midst of the resulting confusion, put in its place a Global Monetary Authority [GMA - run directly by international bankers freed of any government control] -a planetary financial control organization" - Bruce Wiseman
"Failure" is such a non-PC term.
Shouldn't we say "success impaired" or something?
Any chance you could add a plot of the number of FDIC employees by year?
Interesting article on the rationing of healthcare
Why We Must Raton Health Care - NY Times
It'll take years to close the oft-mentioned 500 banks!
I mentioned yesterday that 100 banks failing this year is almost a non-event.
Is the low number of failures due to the ramp up of FDIC resources or some other factor?
Yikes, FDIC's budget is nearly doubling in 1 year. Now that's a green shoot.
Salaries and Compensation
2008: $704,577,180
2009: $935,905,090
Outside Services - Personnel
2008: $266,382,221
2009: $871,421,001
update....watson back in the lead..tough shot out of old divot on 16....
reading last nights thread...never thought I would see CR turn into a marriage-women bashing gig....
How much of this is driven by fewer failed banks and how much is driven by the FDIC inability to deal with big failed banks?
And do these bank failure data include WaMu and Wachovia?
Some reporting suggestions (not a complaint) -
Inflation-adjusted failed assets
Failed assets as % of total banking assets
I speculate that failures peak in approx two years unless a sudden stop occurs
Taibbi hits hard at GS again.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/141417/the_scandal_continues%3A_the_billions_in_govt.cash_behind_goldman%27s%22profits%22/
Why do I keep getting premonitions of this guy dying in a plane crash?
Due to FDIC gaurentees we don't run to the bank anymore.
If all depositors went to a failing bank and removed funds, there would be many more "failed" banks. The reserve amounts would plumet.
What happens when Chase pisses off enough people that they remove thier accounts? Checking, savings, CDs, brokerage etc. And why are we not that angry? Is it because moving funds is a hassle and all the other banks are just as bad?
bank failures update?
im confused, remind me again please
whats a bank?
"Success challenged" barf.
Well, yeah, josap. Exactly right.
Is it because moving funds is a hassle and all the other banks are just as bad?
Moving funds is fairly easy.
The others banks are just as bad. It's also a pain to setup direct deposit and automatic bill payment at the new bank.
failure=non-profit
Due to FDIC gaurentees we don't run to the bank anymore.
Speak for yourself.
creditcriminalslovetarp (profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 9:44 am
reply ignore user
update....watson back in the lead..tough shot out of old divot on 16....
reading last nights thread...never thought I would see CR turn into a marriage-women bashing gig....
Looks like it was another failed Saturday night and time to blame everyone besides yourself sort of thread.
@josap
I got annoyed at the monthly fee BOA was charging on a 30 year old account so I went across the street and opened a new account at another bank. A few days later I went in to deposit a local check and was told there would be a five day hold.
So I went back to BOA and got the fee eliminated. I had no idea I was getting special treatment because of the age of the account.
Myself has very little of my funds in any bank.
Unfortunately, my clients funds have to be in the bank.
This is kind of meaningless in and of itself. Is there any way to normalise to the total number of banks during the periods in question, and the proportion of the total banking deposits that the failed ones individually controlled?
1 big bank failing is different to 100 micro ones etc., etc.
-- w
OT
from previous
several talked about some having to downsize their life style under the gun
one complained (with snark) how tough it was to get by in the low six figures
i have willingly downsized year after year living on such a paltry sum that many here would shocked and repulsed
and i got not quite wealthy, but lets say, secure, doing it
ps retired at age 55
ps you can see me out in my boat on the puget sound this sunny day
im the guy in the small, trailered, 14 foot sailboat (bought used) next to all the other big boats
look hard to see me
mines the only boat in the pictured thats paid for
Yes, curious, yes.
this doesn't look so bad. what are so upset, again? oh yeah. we're upset over the criminality of tbtf and over the banks capture of our government. note, however, that joe six pack doesn't give a sh** about these things. so long as things seem copacetic at the shopping mall and on tv, he doesn't care.
I should probably close my shorts.
mhdoc
was it the age of the account or the fact that you took your money elsewhere?
The bank I use have removed fees and made some nice offers to keep my business accounts. And this was without me threatening to leave, just callling and being upset about a new fee they tried to slip in. The new fee was a "deposit cash" fee. Well, they are a bank, banks take cash! I was really angry.
People have asked how to get better treatment from their lender.
It's easy. Miss a payment. They will fall over themselves.
Credit score will be briefly dinged, but so what?
They tried to charge for depositing cash, hunh? Did they hold the cash,
'til it cleared?
@josap
I'm not much into burning bridges and keep little money in the account. I had not said anything to BOA about moving. It had never even occurred to me that immediate credit for most deposits was something special.
We could have saved more. We didn't. I'm not sorry.
Less there to steal.
How about stockpiling a shitload of booze. Booze lasts
a long time and it's not likely that demand for it is going away any time soon.
'Course if you are going to drink it all personally the savings part won't work.
mhdoc. I understand that BofA is famous for doing that.
I am upset with banks for several reasons.
Lowering credit limits without real cause.
Increasing minimum payments that then cause people to default.
Adding fees at will.
Increasing fees at will.
Not lending to people with good credit and hording my tax dollars that were given without my consent.
Probably more things.
solar path - from the previous thread - Is CIT not eligible for TLGP and CPFF? As a bank holding company, I would expect them to be able to tap into government-backed cheap funding, no?
mt: to be debt free is to be free
They are doing all that stuff because they are insolvent.
They have been insolvent for at least 2 1/2 years now.
Phony electrons not moving at absolute zero in these zombis.
I understand you can buy a really cheap boat now.
mos, yes I see it taking years to bring down small community banks. I found not to let my bank know what I was doing by going almost entirely cash. In my mailbox I found a brochure from my local bank saying come in, we will make you loans from 100.00 dollars up for less than anyother financial institution. Since I'm the only other business in town that makes small loans I knew they had looked at my accounts. I had already looked at the age of their employee's and the amount of what their payroll must be and knew without turning out money making loans they could'nt survive. Two months later their manager was gone and the loan sec. had been promoted to manager while the bank teller was now Asst. Manager with only part time help. Within the last two years they had dropped from 10 employee's to now two.
Just two years ago this same bank was telling customers it cost to much to process loans under 500.00 dollars and there just wasn't a market for it.,yet, here let me give you a cc with a 5000k limit which should tie you over. I' m saying they are trying every trick in the book to get lean to be bought out, before the sh##t hits the fan.
boa is a n c bank as is wachovia(walk over you) and bbt and you have to watch them a hawk. they are seriously evil. i really think that is why nations(or nc nb) took bank of america's name.
ll, it's probably illegal for you to sell booze. albeit a great idea, the problems you would have with the local sherriff diminish liquor's utility as a store of value. personal consumption aside, of course.
update-watson in lead by going into 18...
Poic- yeah...I think you ment'd your wife is chinese, my gf is too..most of the commenters last night are clueless on women, yet not so on economy...they should stick with economic matters...
booze would be a great barter item, but I hope we never get reduced to that.
@RockyR
In a TSHTF situation it seems like a stronger local "currency" than silver or gold
I've got an apocalypse/ retirement liquor stash.
Up to four or five cases of fifths now...
Mostly whiskey, but some bourbon, vodka and rum.
Don't want the ammo stash getting lonely.
Missed the thread last night...
Was Lucifer carrying on again?
India Will Resist Pressure From U.S. on Carbon Emissions Caps
India to Resist U.S. Pressure on Carbon Emission Caps (Update1) - Bloomberg.com
But Hoover told them to do it...?
OT: Rail volume. Not as bad as this spring but for a few nagging issues:
"Intermodal volume of 176,887 trailers or containers was down 23.7 percent from the same week last year. Container volume fell 19.4 percent and trailer volume dropped 40.3 percent. Total volume on U.S. railroads for the week ending July 11 was estimated at 28 billion ton-miles, off 16.9 percent from the same week last year.
All 19 carload freight commodity groups were down from last year, with declines ranging from 4.2 percent for the catch-all category labeled “all other carloads” to 58.4 percent for metals and metal products." [emphasis added]
60% less than last year's metal products moving around the country is the mother of all leading indicators.
In a TSHTF situation it seems like a stronger local "currency" than silver or gold
Except that it is not very portable and not great for larger amounts of wealth.
It would be hard to carry $100k worth of booze with you if you need to leave the country.
mhdoc, sure it does. again, expensive insurance against an improbable event.
RockyR....so true
Lawyerliz...yeah cheap and getting cheaper!!!
homegnome,
you didn't miss a thing...
RD
Coinz I agree and there is always moonshine.
It would be hard to carry $100k worth of booze with you if you need to leave the country.
By that time $100K might buy only a couple of bottles of whiskey anyway
RD says:
60% less than last year's metal products moving around the country is the mother of all leading indicators.
It's paper products that seem to move the US...written in black, white and green with a lot of gray in between..
Missed the thread last night...
Was Lucifer carrying on again?
You must be psychic.
This is nothing compared to the S&L crisis. There were 28 weeks during the S&L crisis when regulators closed 10 or more banks, and the peak was April 20, 1998 with 60 bank closures...
1998? Peak Bank Failure? But those were the Clinton Years, and everyone knows the Clinton Years were blissfully awesome, and life didn't start to suck until Bush got elected.
re: CIT
CIT's application to the TLGP hasn't been approved (not rejected either) as the FDIC has serious concerns over its books. In any event, the window is pretty much closed as FDIC has already began phasing out the program. It had been set to close at the end of Q2, but has been extended to 10/31/09. If IIRC, CIT has issued CP to the CPFF, however, the limit for the facility is the maximum amount outstanding between the dates 1/1/08-8/31/08. My guess is that, because of CIT's business model, very little of its funding had been based on CP, so that the CPFF doesn't provide much of a lifeline.
Paper products.
My sister works for a large paper mill / manufacturer. They make napkins, toilet paper, paper towels. Mostly for fastfood, hotels, commercial accounts.
Last year they shipped avg 28 semi truck loads a day, this year 4 trucks a day.
They use recyled goods and can now get all the cardboard boxes free, if they go get them.
The S&L crisis was in 1988, not 1998.
Simon Johnson comments on the NYTimes piece I linked to in the previous thread and mentions that he believes Summers is running for the Fed chair
Summers has an unparalleled ability to move the consensus. And if he is now running from the left to become chair of the Fed – which was my impression on Friday – this will shift all candidates, including Ben Bernanke, towards being tougher on banks.
OT-dang..watson/cink 4 hole playoff...Cink is putting better..Watson had chance..3/4 swing 8 iron would have made him winner...
Josap-that's eye opening as everyone keeps mentioning here that eateries are full still...
Basel Too - thanks, very helpful
OT:
What is everyone's take on the conspiracy rumors that big banks are using front-running/packet sniffing/high frequency trading to prop up the equities markets?
As someone who has worked in Wall Street I.T., I find this stuff almost silly because IT usually can just barely keep the systems up and running for what they were intended to do, yet alone repurposed for market propping actions.
Then again I think equities are artificially defying gravity. But I don't think a conspiracy is required for that...
edit: zerohedge seems to be the source of a lot of this crap.
When I go to JackintheBox for a fast lunch they used to put in 4 or 5 napkins, now it is 2.
TacoBell gives me 2 pks of hot sause, not the 4 or 5 they used to dump in.
A penney saved is .......
On the CIT thing, there was an article in the LATimes saying that the LA rag business uses CIT as their factor.
High-end rags are one of the last traditional sweatshop businesses left in LA.
They are mostly pretty marginal, so no surprise that they are heavily factored.
There used to be one here in SM that I knew of, but they got chased out of town when the commercial rents skyrocketed during the dot.bomb.
From the last thread....I sell IT equipment to county and city governement. It is going to be one tough year. All my customers are cutting way back. I have some customers who say they wont get anything for years. I also heard that the stimulus money is only being spent saving government jobs. I guess Obama was right. He may be saving jobs.
Off topic, but it looks like California's very, very close to a budget deal. A few details here:
California budget deal taking shape - Sacramento Politics - California Politics | Sacramento Bee
josap,
That triggered a recollection/pet peeve for me. Back when I used to drive more, I would occasionally stop at the clown to get a quick meal, and they would always hand me the drink without a bag. I would always have to ask for a bag so that the drink would not leak on the upholstery. Thinking back, it's just Ralston Purina in the Box that did that, it was all of them.
"Due to FDIC gaurentees we don't run to the bank anymore"
When Volcker said the ATM is the most important financial innovation of our time I wonder if he was thinking of daily withdrawal limits. ATMs would be the first line of defense in a bank run or holiday..
jogleaso;
Oh terrific. So instead of automating government operations, we going to keep paper-pushers on staff?
Change back on your Hope.
Basel I am still looking up all the acronyms
Rob Dawg:
I think this is a better website to track rail freight:
Railfax
And things look just as bad there.
off the OC fair. have a great day everyone.
zerohedge, like market-ticker, has lost a lot of credibility in the past few months.
Coinz
How much is admission now. havent been there in years.
Rocky R
How So?
"It would be hard to carry $100k worth of booze with you if you need to leave the country."
It would take some explaining.
Unfortunately Luci was joined by several others.
sm_landlord, Yes, these are people that would have a hard time making it in the real
world
When we don't buy toilet paper any more the shit will hit, err, um, I guess
it won't hit anything, it will just stick.
OkieLawyer (homepage, profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 10:41 am
I think this is a better website to track rail freight:
Railfax
And things look just as bad there.
Railfax is quoted here weekly better for most things agreed. I used the rail association to break out the metal and metal products sector. Mentioned above is also the paper and lumber products sector. You can't give cardboard away these days.
"Yes, these are people that would have a hard time making it in the real
world"
Which one is the real world?
LOL Liz.
There are many things we can do without, TP is not one of them.
Many of us are old enough to remember a time before plastic trash bags. Other items we now think of as everyday normal, TP has always been there. Like air LOL.
Just read the thread from last night.
Glad I didn't have to endure that in real time.
Apocalypse Stash:
1. Silver
2. Liquor
3. Lead
4. T.P.
There are many things we can do without, TP is not one of them.
Generations of Soviet people lived without TP, although they also had newspapers at the time.
Later, all
tim, i have watched both of those sites post predictions of market plunge, gs troubles, bond market meltdown, incorrect technical analyses and narratives for months, now... none of which have come to pass. hard for me to take them all that seriously. boy that cried wolf and all.
Leaves.
But you can't flush leaves.
The Romans used sponges. I guess slaves washed them out.
Oh, a fascinating tax fact. The Emperor Vespasianus, who counts as
one of the very good ones, taxed urine. Used (after it turns to amnonia, I
guess in the public laudries. The Romans had cold cream, but never, to
my knowledge, had soap.
Ok how about some humor while the playoff is happening, the world is ending and tp runs out...
Mexico Builds Border Wall To Keep Out U.S. Assholes | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
"TP has always been there. Like air LOL. "
My father used to tell me about life on the farm. Corncobs and Sears Catalogs.
Well, that's about as useful as most newspapers are...
rocky I see bad predictions yeah I'll have to agree with that but we could wake up tomorrow it could all happen IMO.
I remember before white out!!! I remember carbon paper!!
I remember changing typewriter ribbon (which lasted a long time),
and cleaning off typewriter keys!!
I also remember wandering around the neighborhood by my pre-pubescent
self, or with a girl friend or 2, and my mother not worrying.
I remember streetcars.
No more newspapers, maybe!
OT: Shameless Self Promotion.
If you are getting hungry or just need a break from the DOOM; check out my homepage.
It will make Mrs. Gnome happy.
I sell IT equipment to county and city governement. It is going to be one tough year.
IT boom is over.
It ended in the 2001 Crash, really.
In 2005, I predicted a continued decline at DEFCON in Vegas but I doubt even 5% of the audience understood my point.
There won't be a recovery.
It's about declining marginal utility of information.
The tomato juice bread is rising.
Gotta rouse myself to make the gazpacho.
I think I will make some of the bread into garlic cheese
swirrels.
Broward has the essence. We are all living a real time experiment of the consequences of forestalling a recession for 6 years.
My mom wanted to know if the tomato juice bread was done.
Had to remind her it has to rise.
I have to beat her off the pancakes and crepes, so I can finish
making them before we sit down. She likes to eat, but was never
much of a cook.
Yum, crepes are awesome.
broward
Downhill from here?
"Besides spending cuts, the budget proposal includes capturing more than $4 billion from cities, counties and special districts."
lolololol
Oh, yeah, hollywood. Capturing.
What if the locals say no? Are the state troops gonna
invade?
You saw this, Dawg?
340 IT startup companies in Seattle, alone.
Seattle Startup Index
I'd guesstimate that 90% of these will fail in the next 3-4 years.
It's a saturated market, saturated by attention bandwidth.
Tim, yes, we're living the IT equivalent of 1893-1896 which was the final gasp of the railroad boom.
The railroads still continued on and still grew but at a much slower pace and eventually shed about 30% of their employment.
Every time I vote for polls to be banished I get told, "Validation error, please try again. If this error persists, please contact the site administrator". Did Ken contract out to Diebold for the voting code?
Maybe the poll is over with.
lawyerliz (profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 11:18 am
Oh, yeah, hollywood. Capturing.
What if the locals say no? Are the state troops gonna
invade?
The State thinks it has until December 11th to deal with that problem. That's when the Counties forward their biannual property tax increments.
tim, sure. but the better analysts at least acknowledge the futility of prediction. that is why i like cr. he posts data and observations and only offers long-range predictions that at least come with some caveats. the others now appear to me to be talking their books.
Mismanagement at Sears all thru the years:
About 100 years ago, a miner from Alaska sent $5 to Sears, in Chicago, for a supply of toilet paper. They sent the money back, saying he needed to order from the catalog. He rplied, "If I had the catalog, I wouldn't need the toilet paper".
CHP vs LA county sherrifs? now THAT would be entertaining.
i really wonder which part of 'blood from a stone' they don't get... or, perhaps, 'water from the salton' is a more californian version...
That would have bought a LOT of toilet paper then.
CIT scrambling-latest news
CIT in $3 billion rescue deal with bondholders - MarketWatch
HollywoodHack (homepage, profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 11:22 am
CHP vs LA county sherrifs? now THAT would be entertaining.
i really wonder which part of 'blood from a stone' they don't get... or, perhaps, 'water from the salton' is a more californian version...
Owens Lake.
Are the state troops gonna invade?
That' question is if Federal troops are gonna invade.
FEDS GO OVERBOARD AGAIN.... Feds Declare Tennessee Gun Law Invalid
Feds Declare Tennessee Gun Law Invalid
broward (homepage, profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 2:24 pm
* Are the state troops gonna invade?*
That' question is if Federal troops are gonna invade.
I know, the answer is, head butt the tar baby!
Rocky R I agree
broward great analogy to the railroads. I heard it compared to the railroads ten years ago. They mentioned that Japan never built heavy rail and even today can't move cargo. I thhink the US lacks heavy rail broadband and always will.
Also about SEA startups. How many of these try to emulate facebooks money losing model?
A tar baby reference, lordy be!!
broward,
are you basing your analysis on the slowdown (to near halt) of real technological innovation/advancement in the it sector, thus resulting in decreased demand for new it investment (maintenance mode only). or, are you speaking only of the it labor market as local resources are supplanted by india? fwiw, i don't see a replacement for current corporate it infrastructures on even a mid-term horizon.
CA budget tricks
"Besides spending cuts, the budget proposal includes capturing more than $4 billion from cities, counties and special districts.
It also relies on accounting tricks, such as increasing income tax withholding schedules by 10 percent to shift money from 2010-11 to 2009-10, as well as delaying state worker paychecks next June 30 to July 1."
I read somewhere that as to a technology it was 3 generations to perfection.
then if we are still creative, people go off and do something else.
I think the something else will be something stunning in the general
bio field.
Early computers were what? Early 1950s? 1950 + 75 = 2025.
Life in the post crash world...
He continued "Gil wasn't always an asshole. He just hasn't adjusted well to not having any money." As an aside he added "A lot of us haven't."
Max nodded "Yep. It's been rough."
This was what Max was good at. Talking to people. He could project a strong, nonjudgmental, and caring attitude at the flick of a switch. People ate it up. Especially scared ones.
Old Guy paused. Even I knew he had something he wanted to say. You could tell he was trying to control both the flow of his words and the naked need in what he was going to say. He almost did too. "Well, I am a pretty good operator. I learned in the SeaBees way back when. And, well, I could use some work and..." Here he stopped. His hands were on top of the table. They looked old, brown, ropey, and scarred. No wedding ring either.
American Apocalypse
How many of these try to emulate facebooks money losing model?
I only looked five or six but if you look at the rankings by SSI reach, you get a quick idea of what's viable.
Zillow tops the index.
The financial fraud was possible because most people chose not to understand a complicated system.
I think there's a similar fraud in the advertising rankings which will shake out in the next couple of years.
Did someone win the golf thing?
What figure is the state, ca, thinking the cities, counties etc will collect?
Bet they don't collect anywhere near what the state has figured on.
Liz I worked in banks before we were numbers, posted checks A-G.
"Zillow tops the index."
i guess telling folks their house is worth 20% more than its actual value has a certain "feel-good" appeal to it
Well, they aren't collecting so much in Florida, I presume
Cali isn't much different.
But at least the state isn't trying to take the little they
have away.
"It's about declining marginal utility of information."
We're down to pushing IT into the industries that are slowest to change.
Medicine, Government, Cinema, etc.
Want a laugh? Check out this Disney Training Video for projectionists.
Yeah, I worked for a bank in the early 70s which had just changed over
from manual balancing. They were talking about a paperless world even
then.
And I still want to know what the minimal sustainable consumer spending
percentage is.
are you basing your analysis on the slowdown (to near halt) of real technological innovation/advancement in the it sector
I'm basing it on people and the previous boom.
They'll only spend so much time reading.
The shakeout right now is in newpapers.
The initial boom was a granular interactive environment displacing a coarse push-only environment (television, newspapers) so there was a lot of growth. The next wave of growth will be much more difficult because there's no old, feeble prey to feed upon. The leverage of existing frameworks is much larger, you need fewer people to accomplish the same task.
broward (homepage, profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 2:19 pm
It's a saturated market, saturated by attention bandwidth.
Not just bandwidth. On the hardware side, it's an issue of commoditization.
I have a potentially very lucrative gig right now. i drew up my hardware upgrade list. It includes a dual-core desktop with a terabyte drive (MSI Nettop 100) and a laptop with a 10+ hour battery life (EEE seashell 1005HA-H).
It runs less than 700 bucks. I could buy stuff that's beefier, but it'd be performance for its own sake. Even if I buy a hellacious new monitor to go with them, it'll be under a grand. All of them will be running a free OS.
The new is off, this is a commoditized product being priced accordingly.
it's an issue of commoditization.
Agree.
After using Drupal for a couple of weeks, I see how someone with a medium skill level could create 50 websites per year.
How many websites do you need?
It's going to look like the agriculture market, 2% of the population creating all the infrastructure & content.
Broward
Precisely Why I think GOOGLE is overvalued. Well Said +10.
Help Wanted signs at banks are a thing of the past (Help Wanted sign are also in general, a thing of the past):
A report issued Friday by the Employment Development Department in Sacramento also hints at how the state budget deficit will affect California, which lost 6,700 government jobs in June.
"That's the tip of the iceberg," said Stephen Levy with the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto.
California lost 66,500 jobs in June
liz, cink beat watson in playoff, the bogey on the 18th couldn't be overcome...he had it..would have been a great story...
So we need something else to do.
Incidentally, I need something on that level to tell me what
to do, were I in the challenging field of projectionist.
Inbetween, I'd be posting here.
Was still a great story.
A thrill for 60 year olds everywhere.
"It runs less than 700 bucks. I could buy stuff that's beefier, but it'd be performance for its own sake. Even if I buy a hellacious new monitor to go with them, it'll be under a grand."
I don't know about you, but for me performance is still an issue. Each new generation is snappier than the last, but I want millisecond responsiveness, sub 5 second boot time, etc. And a really nice monitor is still almost $2K, although you can get pretty good ones for under $1K now.
On bandwidth, the last mile problem is still a major issue for me. I want 100Mb/s up and down for under $100/month.
But then, I'm hard to please.
No longer is banks keeping people over retirement age, replacing with part-timers on their cell phones.
OT, a great summation of the worthless corporate-owned media of this country (and why most of us are spending our time on CR and other blogs): Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
In the various computing equipment paradigms, the threat has always come from below - from the smaller, simpler device. Already, SmartPhones are co-opting end-user computing tasks. I suspect the desktop computer will be a relic in 5 years or less, and with it, INTC/MSFT's margins.
Optimism is waning: looking at a slow summer and an anemic fall recovery
Moving into the second half of what will surely remain a dismal year, the consensus calls for a third
quarter that might, at best, avoid further contraction in the U.S. economy.
http://www.conference-board.org/pdf_free/economics/2009_07_15.pdf
Constrained availability, higher cost, and uncertainties about the quality of
capital will slowly begin to eat into potential output growth, as cutbacks in physical, human, and other
intangible capital continue, and the economy moves onto a slower growth path that will continue
through 2010 and possibly beyond.
liz-my bad, your correct a great story no matter the outcome....makes me want to hit some balls again...
I don't know, lawyerliz, but we just might find out soon here in Phoenix.
Lots of stuff for sale on craigslist, few takers.
I think a lot of money has dried up this summer in Phoenix, and a lot of folks did not leave town for vacation.
Someday this war's gonna end...
broward (homepage, profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 2:41 pm
Agree.
After using Drupal for a couple of weeks, I see how someone with a medium skill level could create 50 websites per year.
How many websites do you need?
Coming to game design too. Check out Battle For Wesnoth's scripting engine.
Maury the Credit Responsibility Panda (profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 2:50 pm
I suspect the desktop computer will be a relic in 5 years or less, and with it, INTC/MSFT's margins.
I'm buying mine with the assumption it will mostly be a remote drayhorse used at network distances. i don't see them as having much future outside of being a sophisticated headless network appliance.
need I go on? good articles: Interesting Finance & Economic articles
As someone who has worked in Wall Street I.T., I find this stuff almost silly because IT usually can just barely keep the systems up and running for what they were intended to do
<
p>Dont take this personally, but theres a reason you used the past tense referring to your employment in Wall St. IT. When IT is done right, its works... period. Its not any more correct to apply your limited experiences with IT across the whole industry, than the way Lucifer paints all women with the same broad strokes.
<
p>Its more than plausible for such an operation to be running smoothly, in fact Id be surprised if it wasnt. As you no doubt know since you 'worked in IT', MOST if not ALL problems in IT come from a User->Machine communication. Machine->Machine communication can do amazing things thousands of times a second, correctly, every time. Wall St. IT isnt bush league small office stuff, its the 'big show' so to speak. And quite frankly, your perception of IT itself being the weak link, and not the users, is probably why you arent using the present tense in your description of your employment with Wall St. IT.
<
p>Again, Im not trying to attack you personally, but the attitudes you have for the industry you are supposed to be working in, is one Id expect to see more form an end-user, not a engineer. Are you aware you are blaming inanimate machines, whos only purpose is to take your instructions, for the problems in IT? Has it ever occurred to you that the flaw might lie in your methods of instructing those machines what to do? Come on, you are supposedly in IT, its your JOB to troubleshoot problems and find the correct solutions. Sometimes the hardest problems to see are the ones you dont want to, especially when the ego gets in the way.
<
p>Or, as a poster wiser than me, on this very board said a few threads back;
"One day you will live to be old enough to understand, until then enjoy the stupor"
Google 2009 == AOL 1999.
wow, the network monkey has thin skin
The money is in original work.
That's one reason I stopped spending time on programming/infrastructure stuff in 2005 and spent more time on the data-mining.
One boom area will be AI in specialized fields like medical diagnosis.
One of our vendors did a demo last year of a semantic analysis engine which was stunning to anyone who knows what's under the hood. The average observer was bored, though. Essentially, it parsed through hundreds of web pages during a few weeks and FIGURED OUT that "Denver" was a city, based solely on semantic context in articles. It wasn't programmed to use DENVER == city, it figured it out from how other people spoke about Denver. Amazing stuff.
I don't think the accusation is that the IBs are packet-sniffing, or in any way seeing the trades before they hit the NYSE's servers. IBs are allowed to co-locate their servers at the NYSE, with the exchange's complicity. They can take advantage of packet latency to front-run trades done from outside the exchange. It may or may not be propping NYSE stocks up, but the goal is to poach trades originating from the west coast.
SEC should combat it with a simple rule - bid and ask have to stand for a minimum of 1 second.
Re: "need I go on?"
Swine Flu Pandemic
Swine flu, if they close 20% of all schools the economy comes to a grinding halt.
"The money is in original work."
Agreed. Third-generation applications. Lots of stuff to do, especially now that it's possible to build reliable systems at a lower price point. RevolutionWIllNotBeTelevised had a point about reliability. Systems are now powerful enough to do much better on the UI side, so another challenge is idiot-proof UIs. There is no reason that the user of an email client should have to know about smtp port numbers and PKI certificates in order to configure their software, for example.
Don't know about the conspiracy theories but there are financial trading companies that exist solely to be quicker than others. A friend of mine joined a startup in NYC a few months ago. He sits in front of 9 screens and watches how quickly data comes in, out and gets processed. That's the life of this year's MBA graduates. Glad it's not me, I'd rather shoot myself in the head, but it does make him money.
wow, so you actually are in Hollywood(or at least near)? neat.
Lots of stuff to do
But at a very narrow scale and scope.
You don't need an army of programmers, you need one PhD in statistics and one PhD in language.
What is this stuff?
The Tabulator Extension
The Tabulator Extension
sm_landlord (profile) wrote (in reply to...) on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 2:47 pm
But then, I'm hard to please.
You are, and it's an ever-shrinking segment of the marketplace. I have a 19" flat screen monitor bought 5 years ago for like, 250 bucks or 300 bucks, and it's just fine, no smearing, crisp display.
It's really adequate to my needs and the only reason I'll get a new one is we're moving the 360 to the family room and I want a widescreen display that's all nice and big for showpiece use.
I feel I'm pretty representative -- I'm technically adept and I feel very well-served by the current generation of hardware, even at the low end.
Maury the Credit Responsibility Panda (profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 3:02 pm replyIgnore userI don't think the accusation is that the IBs are packet-sniffing, or in any way seeing the trades before they hit the NYSE's servers. IBs are allowed to co-locate their servers at the NYSE, with the exchange's complicity. They can take advantage of packet latency to front-run trades done from outside the exchange. It may or may not be propping NYSE stocks up, but the goal is to poach trades originating from the west coast
Twodifferent issues. packet-sniffing and propping up markets. Propping up the markets part is the belief that HFPT are trading with each other in the same direction with basically the same risk avoidance, no diversity.
Systems are now powerful enough to do much better on the UI side, so another challenge is idiot-proof UIs.
Not happening. Even MS, with it's lock on most corporate desktops and corporate applications, can't make interfaces consistent, much less idiot proof.
It's more realistic to push the configuation up the IT food chain into the hands of the system admins. The tools exist, but you need trained and motivated admins to use them.
You are, and it's an ever-shrinking segment of the marketplace.
Yes, and you stay on the marginal long enough and you get abandoned.
80/20 rule, nobody wants to spend $500,000 in development to capture 5 customers.
Nobody still in business, that is.
Propping up the markets part is the belief that HFPT are trading with each other in the same direction with basically the same risk avoidance, no diversity.
And I think that's very plausible, with program trading being such a large percentage of the exchanges' volume. Never something you can prove.
"You don't need an army of programmers, you need one PhD in statistics and one PhD in language."
I would broaden that to say you need a few domain experts that can code, a systems/network guy/gal, and maybe a systems programmer for any down&dirty stuff you hit, like device interfaces.
For non-trivial projects, it's helpful to have an architect to keep the domain experts from making stupid architectural mistakes. Otherwise, you frequently end up having to re-write big chunks to get the performance you need.
And if I read between the lines correctly HH also thinks Hollywood is still relevant.
Designing the Obvious is a book with some good user interface ideas. I also find Paul Graham's essays have a lot of useful insight into creating systems.
you frequently end up having to re-write big chunks to get the performance you need.
This is an issue I've heard over and over again in interviews. The larger companies that coded for performance almost uniformly want to switch to hardware-focus and rewrite their codebase to standards, and the newer companies without experience still talk about "coding for performance". I've concluded that performance is a hardware issue, you code to a standard, predictable structure and tweak performance with hardware.
Liz - sounds like you read Lindsey Davis - one of my favorite authors - I made myself a couple of Vespasian denarius earrings last year. Have you read any of the Gordianus the Finder series by Steven Saylor? Also recommended.
we're living the IT equivalent of 1893-1896 which was the final gasp of the railroad boom. The railroads still continued on and still grew but at a much slower pace and eventually shed about 30% of their employment.
And once that cyclicality bit got flipped, it never unflipped in the next 115 years and now they trade at a PE of 4.
That's one way of looking at the Nazcrash - as a cyclicality bit-flipping.
Here is another cheerful article from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the UK Telegraph: "Fiscal ruin of the western world beckons."
As we say in California, "Have a Nice Day!"
broward (homepage, profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 12:23 pm
The larger companies that coded for performance almost uniformly want to switch to hardware-focus and rewrite their codebase to standards, and the newer companies without experience still talk about "coding for performance". I've concluded that performance is a hardware issue, you code to a standard, predictable structure and tweak performance with hardware.
A lamentable and inevitable consequence of lazy CISC winning out over disciplined RISC architectures.
Broward,
Since the thread is concentrating on IT I'd like to ask you a somewhat vague question. I thought I read somewhere on your website that companies were using IT to push knowledge down to the lower/lowest level workers. From what I've seen recently, knowledge/thinking is being removed from the lowest levels and being replaced with computer automation. At my last job(mortgage payoff processing) the computer based systems were so advanced that humans were out of the loop entirely, or had turned the remaining workers into ants in a click farm.
Do you mean the process is being automated more and more, or that the lower level workers are being given more information?
A lamentable and inevitable consequence of lazy CISC winning out over disciplined RISC architectures.
Like so many things, I see it as an ego issue now.
You've got many young guys who like to code.
So they do what they want, not what's best for the team or long-term future of the company.
El Cliffo,
From the article: "The Fed's doctrine – New Keynesian Synthesis – has let it down time and again in this long saga, and there is scant evidence that Fed officials recognise the fact."
When all you have is a hammer...
"I've concluded that performance is a hardware issue, you code to a standard, predictable structure and tweak performance with hardware."
That doesn't always work. An example I looked at two years ago: Domain experts write a web app, and it demos great. Customers line up to pay. Turns out an eight-server cluster won't support more than 100 users - oops. No money to re-code it properly, so the product died a lonely death.
"Here is another cheerful article from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the UK Telegraph: "Fiscal ruin of the western world beckons."'
I'm getting to the point where I read articles like this and think: I don't give a damn.
Evans-Pritchard has been predicting financial apocalypse for some time now. One day he might succeed if he keeps trying.
Do you mean the process is being automated more and more,
I don't remember writing anything about that but from my experience what's happening is that the leverage of existing workers is being increased so that their total number can be decreased. For example, we did a mobile roadside system. The previous paper system required hundreds of data entry clerks, they had over one hundred in Texas alone. There's a couple now left that do simple edit checks on exceptions. I figure it was a reduction of 90%. That was my first experience with destroying the jobs of other people, it was a disturbing realization.
Likewise, we did a sales ordering application to serve perhaps 1000 sales people.
I suspect that about half those people are gone now.
You've got many young guys who like to code. So they do what they want, not what's best for the team or long-term future of the company.
I support a commercial database server product. One story from about 5 years ago... 2 of our guys published an ACM paper on a new hashing algorithm that offered a substantial performance improvement. We spent an entire release cycle rolling it out into all of our products. It turned out to be as fragile as a glass goblin in a multithreaded environment under stress, so support frequently wound up having customers. Knowing exactly how this would work out, support requested a configuration knob that would allow us to disable it.
without giving out any identifiable info, I would say...
certainly, yes.
broward (homepage, profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 12:30 pm
[ CISC winning out over RISC]
Like so many things, I see it as an ego issue now.
You've got many young guys who like to code.
So they do what they want, not what's best for the team or long-term future of the company.
Yeah, any drone can organize 80 operations to do a job the right way. But, but with 400 possible and subtle choices... then creativity can come into play. Just what we need, clever mission critical software. Not.
T-shirt seen on campus at the other Cambridge, MA school many, many years ago; "Turing Was Verbose".
Turns out an eight-server cluster won't support more than 100 users - oops
I say it's bad design.
When I walked into my BOA branch recently and used the new ATM that scans checks you are depositing front and back, reads the amount, gives you a total and prints a receipt with copies of the check on it, I couldn't thinking the tellers had best be looking for new jobs real soon.
pavel.chichikov (homepage, profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 3:32 pm
Evans-Pritchard has been predicting financial apocalypse for some time now. One day he might succeed if he keeps trying.
You speak of it like it's in the future.
why folks like to bash one of only 3 or 4 export industries we have left, and one of the ones with better margins, i know not...
HollywoodHack (homepage, profile) wrote (in reply to...) on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 3:40 pm
why folks like to bash one of only 3 or 4 export industries we have left, and one of the ones with better margins, i know not...
Because it's a dinosaur in search of a tar pit, and something about it turns the people who do it into soul-damaged mutants. It's capital intensive in the same way the music industry was, just on a larger scale, and in the next 20-30 years, it will also be something you do on a laptop in your bedroom, just like making release quality albums.
Here's a scary thought. Think of EBAY. For EBAY to work, everybody needs to know about EBAY, they need to read EBAY, they need to list items on EBAY and participate in bidding.
Imagine if you had a system which could roughly predict when you wanted to sell your car, from changes in your schedule, income, status. And that system communicated with other systems acting as a proxy for billions of other people. Those systems could list items, find buyers, negotiate price, all with no human intervention.
Bingo.
You don't need EBAY anymore.
with all this doom and gloom about IT, should a network admin be concerned about his/her future? I get the sense that future salaries will be trending lower...
also with all this cloud computing talk, will there even be much of a need for IT if most of it can be hosted these days?
"I say it's bad design. Smile"
It was an awful design. But that's what you sometimes get when you let domain experts write code unsupervised. After all, they are domain experts, not code experts.
Tell a politician about a problem and he or she will derive a way government can fix it. Tell a Wall Streeter about a problem and he or she will derive a way to profit from it.
The problem with problems is sometimes solutions become worse problems than the original problems.
hat tip to Interesting Finance & Economic articles
for the good articles
I think you're conflating the film industry with the entertainment industry on the whole, byz...
and any denizen of hollywood knows that there are no dinosaur bones at the tar pits...
"why folks like to bash one of only 3 or 4 export industries we have left, and one of the ones with better margins, i know not..."
Which is why, of course, we are busily exporting large parts of the industry.
kind of like the role extended families used to perform in our society...
but who needs uncle bill when you have skynet, right?
with all this doom and gloom about IT, should a network admin be concerned about his/her future? I get the sense that future salaries will be trending lower...
also with all this cloud computing talk, will there even be much of a need for IT if most of it can be hosted these days?
Someone still has to run the cloud and the network connections to the cloud. And since you're going to have legacy systems that you can't push onto the cloud you need a few legacy admins.
Of course all these systems can be managed more or less from India.
Turns out an eight-server cluster won't support more than 100 users
Do you possibly have any more details about that? Ive seen some pretty sh**ty managed hosting in my days, so it might not have been the app itself, as much as the hosting company.
One recent example that comes to mind was of a client using 'Comapny A' for managed hosting. When client signed up with 'Company A', the managed hosting plan was using a Veritas backup solutiuon across all the servers. Later 'Company A' decides to switch to a backup solution from IBM, Tivoli to be exact. The backups went form finishing in a matter of hours under Veritas, to sometimes not finishing in a 24-hr cycle. You can guess how fun it then was when the next daily scheduled backup came, and the previous one was still running.
Im not saying that was a similar situation, but you cant always blame the developers. Problems can pop up anywhere, and everywhere.
"we are busily exporting large parts of the industry. "
not too sure about that - the US and Japan tend to keep their flagship development at home in terms of interactive entertainment, and the world overseas still has a strong appetite for big, stupid american blockbusters, and doesn't often succeed in making them.
Looks like HH is getting a real earful from the rest of America. Everything that can be subbed and outsourced has left the industry in the same position as Chrysler and GM.
I think you're conflating one phenomenon (live shots leaving LA) in one sector of show biz (film) with the whole enchilada, rob.
show biz has always been global, in any case.
"Do you possibly have any more details about that?"
Without going into great detail, the basic problem was a database bottleneck. The database was not normalized, each web page generated hundreds of database accesses, each of which hit several tables, brute force searches, etc, etc. They had no idea how to deal with a database.
They also got hacked multiple times, but that was probably the "coder's" fault too, not the host.
That's a frightening story about the backups, though.
Digital restoration, animation, "dimensionalization", dubbing, subtitling/captioning, anything that is labor-intensive and can be done at a distance. Color correction is probably next as bandwidth improves.
true, but that still leaves the fun stuff here. i'd also note that most of what you mention is almost entirely found in film/tv, not so much in interactive or live entertainment.
This Friday 4 banks were closed by FDIC.
So far 57 banks failed in 2009 and 82 since 2008.
http://portalseven.com/Failed-Banks-2009
For California, this was the 8th failure this year with total 13 banks fails since 2008.
Of this 13 failures , 8 banks were with the assets of more than $1 billion. 4 medium sized banks with assets between $100 million and $1 billion. And only 1 small bank with assets less than $100 million.
Check all the bank failures in California at
List & Map if Failed Banks in California
For Georgia, 1 bank failed this Friday , taking total to 15 since 2008 and 11th bank failure this year.
Of this 15 failures, 2 banks were with the assets of more than $1 billion. 13 medium sized banks with assets between $100 million and $1 billion.
Check all the bank failures in Georgia at
List & Map if Failed Banks in Georgia
For South Dakota, the failure of Alerus Financial, N.A. was the first one after First Federal Savings Bank of South Dakota, Rapid City was closed by FDIC on on April 24, 1992.
List & Map if Failed Banks in South Dakota
reading last nights thread...never thought I would see CR turn into a marriage-women bashing gig....
If you want to drive traffic mention anything to do with sex.
my clients funds have to be in the bank.
Allen C (profile) wrote on Sun, 7/19/2009 - 6:47 pm
Some reporting suggestions (not a complaint)
Inflation-adjusted failed assets
Failed assets as % of total banking assets
I agree. We really need to look at this in terms of assets to take into account changing market structure/concentration. Number of banks is pretty irrelevant from an historical point of view.
It's fairly easy to pull down total assets and total deposits and then use the GDP deflator to come up with real deposits and assets at defaulted institutions. Why this blog post would instead refer to a meaningless count of failed institutions is beyond me. The top 25 years for # of failures, deposits, and assets are (probably poorly reproduced) below:
maybe this is better?
Rank Year # Year Real Assets Year Real Deposits
1 1933 4000 2009 $291,304,267 2009 $182,685,444
2 1931 2293 1989 $208,756,513 1989 $175,486,998
3 1932 1453 1990 $179,492,245 1990 $139,684,671
4 1930 1350 1991 $169,428,605 1991 $139,445,203
5 1929 659 1992 $103,165,414 1992 $86,017,696
6 1989 534 1988 $63,768,905 1988 $49,170,945
7 1988 470 1987 $21,798,126 1933 $40,521,721
8 1990 382 1986 $21,382,451 1987 $21,156,678
9 1991 271 1985 $14,392,109 1986 $19,624,507
10 1987 262 1983 $11,474,808 1931 $16,349,700
11 1986 204 1984 $10,876,469 1985 $13,216,043
12 1992 181 1980 $10,871,534 1980 $9,235,044
13 1985 180 1978 $10,851,535 1983 $8,766,746
14 1982 119 1981 $9,619,819 1981 $8,606,876
15 1984 106 1979 $8,480,490 1984 $8,332,024
16 1983 99 1994 $7,996,465 1932 $7,741,581
17 1937 75 1977 $4,165,807 1930 $7,256,380
18 1938 74 2008 $2,370,252 1994 $6,391,694
19 1936 69 1982 $2,329,163 1978 $5,280,663
20 1939 60 1976 $1,885,053 1979 $3,790,769
21 2009 53 1971 $1,735,941 1977 $3,111,412
22 1993 50 1993 $1,707,881 2008 $2,279,314
23 1940 43 1995 $1,632,959 1982 $2,021,301
24 1981 40 1972 $1,464,145 1929 $1,926,038
25 2008 30 1996 $637,994 1993 $1,665,955
European & American state aid is interlocked into the International Bank of Settlements, which is tied to World Bank, which is tied into the IMF, which is like all things: Tied into Goldman Sachs!
AIG is run by Edley of Goldman Sachs!
All roads lead to: Goldman Sachs!
Why don't sheeple want to be independent of Goldman Sachs & JP Morgan?
Instead their lives are dictated to by a bunch of arbitrage wielding sycophants & sociopathic criminals who profit by destroying the system!
Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs & Treasury Sec under Bush, "I never saw the banking industry so strong", is involved in Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Geithner & Robert Rubens (also of Goldman Sachs & who was paid 150 million to run Citigroup into the ground) & the privately owned FED Res Bank & other banking oligarchs.
These oligarchs torpedoed pensions to create the new peasant class of indentured servants without medical, retirement or savings, (with the FED tripling money supply in 6 mos inflation is astronomical & wiping out savings)
Actual words: In my 35yrs banking is flourishing and has never been as sound as it is today!
Geithner, who has been wrong about everything for 15 straight years, also former President of the illegal privately owned NY Fed Reserve, convinced Clinton that counterfeit derivatives were a solution & thereby created the Community Reinf Act, its enhancement in 95’ under Clinton; ending the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act; and raised banking Capital to Debt ratios from 1:12 to 1:33!
As of April, Banks are now allowed to hide their true Net Worth, (eg. Mark the Model method enabled Citigroup, Wells Fargo, to post a billion dollar gain when it is sitting on many billions in losses); expect accounting fraud to blow up at an ever increasing tempo!
Right now Citigroup is “buying” its own debt, and booking it as a profit, (just like the Federal Reserve Bank & US Treasury department selling debt to each other). The bank bailouts are like an arsonist getting bailed out with charcoal & lighter fluid! Expect deluded bible-thumping idiots to continue buying their stock.
Currently, the world is forming ad-hoc currency baskets for trade in order to get away from the contamination, which is the US dollar, (google: Shanghai Organizational Coop); & setting up for a new World Order Currency
Meanwhile, the USA has “Stockholm Syndrome”, where the terrorized population through Obama actually supports their terrorist: Last week Obama is actually giving more power to their captors, the Federal Reserve Bank, rather than prosecuting them
Bernanke, Geithner, Rubens, Summers, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan & the Federal Reserve Bank know exactly what they are doing by collapsing the US Dollar:
"The purpose of this financial crisis is to take down the U.S. dollar as the stable datum of planetary finance and, in the midst of the resulting confusion, put in its place a Global Monetary Authority [GMA - run directly by international bankers freed of any government control] -a planetary financial control organization" - Bruce Wiseman