Doomwatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

1/29/2k  Japan to turn to direct loans from its banks - Analysts are surprised by the unusual move, by Stephanie Strom, NYT, front page.
TOKYO - In a striking demonstration of how precarious Japan's financial situation has become, the government plans to borrow money directly from banks to fulfill its obligations to local governments.
Governments normally borrow money by issuing bonds, which is cheaper than taking out bank loans. Japan's unorthodox approach to borrowing now and the size of the shortfall - 8 trillion yen, or roughly $76B - have stunned economists and other market watchers. With one exception, this is the first time since the days after World War II that Japan has taken such a step.... The amount is equivalent to roughly 2% of Japan's GDP, and exceeds the 7.7T yen the government has injected into troubled banks.
[If they needed the dough from the banks, why'd they give it to them in the first place? This is like some kind of big bogus shell game: "Now watch as we put the ¥8T under this shell - these other two are empty, right? Now we switch them around. Lalala. Now which shell do you think has the ¥8T?" Extreme? Maybe you prefer the dam metaphor -]
"The funding mechanism is breaking down," said David Asher, a research fellow in the Japan Program at MIT. "The dam is showing more and more stress fractures, and they're trying to put plaster on them"....
[In case readers haven't noticed, we're in the process of switching our basic metaphor for the beginning of a big depression from the "popping" or "bursting" of the bubble to the fragmentation of the bubble - and that fits the damburst image as well. It never happens in just one big bang, burst or pop. And it's not a smooth and gradual evolution. It's in between, in a way that allowed some people to deny that there was any problem whatsoever all through the 1930s.]
The skyrocketing debt [is] justified by politicians as a way to keep a faltering recovery on track....
[The interesting thing about great depressions is that they're man-made. Human beings keep making stupid decisions that induce them. Politicians don't learn from mistakes of the past, as here. Economists forget hard-learned lessons of the past, as when they all said "Yeah sure!" when short-sighted bankers, brokers and insurance men wanted to invade one another's businesses and repeal the "good fences make good neighbors" of Glass-Steagall (7/02/1999 #2). The "have's" don't realize how much they need, yes, NEED the "have not's" so they keep chipping away more and more of the little share of money the "have not's" get in the great national divvy-up, by chipping down the graduated income tax, decade after decade, starting under the Democrats(!) in 1963 and winding up with that puffy-cheeked googly-eyed madman Steve Forbes, chanting "Flat-tax, flat-tax, flat-tax," like he was unconsciously alerting us of looming flatulance, and well-meaning megadummies like Soros calling for "open societies" even as they push all the levers for funnelling wealth and decision-making through their own "all-wise" hands, propping up systems that need to change, on some excuse about averting catastrophe, and chumming with Murdoch and Turner, our "two guys" media throttle.
[We need to reinvest in our own markets, in our own day-to-day spending and consumption on a GARGANTUAN level relative to today, but all our top executives can think of is saving costs in the form of cutting payroll, all they are capable of is the near- and short-sighted stupidity of fueling a death spiral of downsizing, so desperate are they to hype stock prices without doing the work of really growing their markets instead of just acquiring them.
[Why is the fragmentation of the great, turn-of-the-millennium stock bubble inevitable? Because THTB - the powers that be - richer than Midas, want to test the limits again, want to see how huge a percentage of the money they can funnel through their few hands before they get too close to the imploding armageddon of "ONE guy with ALL the dough" - and 5,999,999,999 starving neighbors, having gone thru all the stages of suctioning the spending power and markets away from their own megascale investment targets. This last phrase gives you some inkling of how impossible it is to even get remotely close to "1% of the population funnelling 99% of the income&wealth" - they robotically assume that balance happens automatically, despite their constant pushing of the envelope. The "Invisible Hand," they repeat, "Adam Smith", "laissez faire, laissez passez", "free trade", "globalization", like balance can take any amount of all the bloated rich-pockets going over to one side of the big high top-heavy ferry without tilt-sinking like the Mariposa Belle.
["Oh, concentrated wealth works just as hard as spread-around wealth." If that is so, why are they so dead against government wealth concentration. Nature doesn't care whether the wealth concentrates in government or the private sector. "God makes His depressions to fall on business-sector AND government -sector concentration alike." And discretionary charity doesn't cut it. It can't possibly keep up with the rate of concentration. The centrifuge process HAS TO BE automatic or it falls behind, further and further. How do you get an automatic centrifuge that is simple, comprehensive and powerful enough to keep up? You design at the comprehensive dimensional level. What's a dimension? Let's go through them: "length, width, height..." - no, that won't get us to the right terminology. Let's try, "line, area, volume/space, mass/matter, momentum/time...." Time counts all activities on a planet's surface, measures them, compares them. It's a simple, comprehensive and powerful dimension. In economic terms, it is "working hours". We can balance it without creating dependency, as we do when we jump to balancing income directly and wind up with a larger and larger population on welfare.
[How do you balance working hours on a simple, comprehensive and vast enough, automatic basis? You establish automatic reinvestment of overtime in under-employment (not just unemployment, because our official rate isn't catching the problem any more). That is, reinvestment of overtime in training and hiring. One way is an overtime tax with an exemption for overtime-targeted on-the-job (re)training and hiring. It's fine to work all the hours you want, as long as you change gears, at a certain point every week, from consuming employment for yourself - concentrating it - to producing employment for others - centrifuging it. This is the drop-dead simplest and most obvious starting point for comprehensive depression-proofing centrifuging. We can bring it in on corporations first, then on individual employees once the corporations have a lot of on-the-job training opportunities going for those who think they need more unaccountable spending money than they can earn within straight time, and then we adjust the level where "overtime" starts so it isn't just the historical accident of the 40/40/40 Plan forever (40 hrs max wkwk, 40 cents min wage, in 1940). We call it Timesizing.]

1/28  2 omens -

1. [Rich salesmen selling themselves - no reality testing - classy cluelessness reigns -]
   Davos forum opens with qualified exuberance, by Alan Cowell, NYT, C4.
   ...Abby Joseph Cohen, the Goldman, Sachs market strategist, said soaring U.S. stock prices were not overvalued....
   [Companies with no profit projections in the foreseeable future and market valuations in the billions? Give us a break. And no concept of the strategic importance of the following thrice-mentioned issue, even on the part of the concerned founder - Mention One:]
   But if there was a looming issue to tinge the crisp, blue skies of Davos [glittery World Economic Forum for the rich and powerful] a darker shade, it was how the haves, who benefit most from the fast-moving advance of technology, would continue to do so without courting the backlash of the have-nots - evident at the WTO meeting in Seattle.... "We cannot forget that we are entering this new age with a lot of unfinished business from the 20th century," said Klaus Schwab, a Swiss academic who founded the economic forum...30 years ago..\..
   [Klaus, baby, they've already forgotten...]
   This is not the kind of gathering where people come to frame stirring resolutions. Rather...it is a place where people meet the people who will be making the deals of tomorrow....
   [Nevertheless, Klaus "don Quixote" Schwab forges on - Mention Two:]
   "Globalization can be a process which can be of benefit to everybody.... So what we have to see here is how we can create the policies and actions in order to make sure that there are no losers [in] this process."
   [Klaus, you're asking the right question. But you're not seeing that there are already MILLIONS of people who are losing in this process because, as a process of unlimited wealth concentration, it is subject to the diminishing marginal efficiency of concentrated wealth. In other words, it can move without hindrance toward the suicidal self-contradiction of ONE person owning ALL the wealth. Of course, it will fragment long before that, but that fragmentation will be similar to the Great Depression, but much "Greater" in proportion to our bigger economy.
   [As for "how we can create the policies and actions" to avoid this, the only complete 'worst case plan' we're aware of is - Timesizing. How can anybody make that claim? We're not alone. This has been discussed outside the superficial mainstream of our economic high theory for decades. Names? You want names? Jean Sismondi, Stephen Leacock, Arthur Dahlberg, William Green, Harold Loeb, James Lincoln, Walter Reuther, Juliet Schor, Benjamin Hunnicutt, Roediger and Foner, John Owen...see our bibliography page. How many times do we need to make the same mistake before we learn the lesson? We need a centrifuge mechanism that can balance the "trickle-down POUR-up" effect - the tendency of wealth to concentrate far beyond consumer-base support.
   [Timesizing does this in the simplest, most generalized, and least micromanaging way possible. It engineers a wage&spending-hiking shortage of labor by very slowly reducing the workweek per person and automating the reinvestment of overtime profits and earnings in training and hiring. And it has a built-in inflation blocker in the mobilization of deflationary incentive in the reinvestment process. Any questions? Email us at timesizing@aol.com or phone us at USA 617.623.8080. Mention Three:]
   Officially, the central theme this year is supposed to be the human impact of Internet technology and biotechnology.... But here too, social perspectives intruded: 50%..\..of chief executives who responded \to\ today's survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers...said they expected Internet-based business to widen the gap between the world's rich and poor, while [only] 38% said the gap would narrow....

2. Analysts, officials voice fears on surging level of margin debt, AP via Boston Globe, C2.
   NEW YORK - A sharp increase in margin debt, the amount of money borrowed by individual "investors" [ed: our quotes; only speculators borrow to buy stocks] to purchase stocks, has some analysts worried that the unprecedented levels could exacerbate a market downturn.... Even Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is expressing concern about the level of margin debt, saying Wednesday during testimony before the Senate that the central bank is studying the matter....
   [But also saying he's not going to (do the obvious & prudent thing and) raise the margin requirements.]
   Americans had borrowed $228.5B to buy stock as of Dec. 31, up from $141B a year earlier - a 62% jump, according to Ned Davis Research, a Venice, Fla., market data firm.... In 1990, the figure stood at around $35B.
   Borrowing accelerated rapidly in the last months of 1999, when the technology-heavy Nasdaq Stock Market was surging upward at an unprecedented rate, said Sam Burns, a research analyst at Ned Davis.... A significant market downturn [such as today's] could wipe out hundreds of thousands of debt-ridden investors and exacerbate a widespread selling panic.

1/24  Surplus in December hit $33.08 billion, AP via NYT, C12.
[Clinton & media still spinning "surplus" with $5¾ trillion debt, not to mention the only way they get a surplus out of this disaster is by invalidly counting in with general funds the Social Security fund which will go bankrupt in a matter of decades unless we quit fooling with it.]
WASHINGTON - The government recorded a $33.08 billion budget surplus in December, helped along by a flow of tax payments, the Treasury Dept. said last week....
[Of course, the Treasury Secretary is Larry Summers, the clown who wants Europe to race to the bottom with us by dismantling their high social safety nets - see story below (1/22).]
Revenue for December 1999 totaled $201.2B while expenditures came to $168.1B....
[Then why aren't you morons paying down the debt instead of making misleading announcements?]

1/22  It seems to be U.S. vs. the other six at the Group of 7 meeting, by Stephanie Strom, NYT, C2.
TOKYO, Jan. 21 - Against the backdrop of the record $26.5 billion U.S. trade deficit...during a press conference this evening, Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers...diplomatically suggested that Japan and Europe were not pulling their weight in the global economy. "You can't have a balanced global economy without more growth in Europe and Japan," he said repeatedly....
[Oh and we bet you're all just dying to know what Larry suggests they do, aren't you!]
Suspicion is rising among U.S. officials that their European counterparts [should be] adopting more politically difficult policies like altering their social welfare benefits and their labor laws.
[Yeah, right. Since when has the U.S. ever adopted politically difficult policies for Europe? We'd make it 84 years ago when Woodrow Wilson, after getting elected on keeping us OUT of the Great War, did the big flipflop and dragged us IN, 3 years late. We were singing, "Oh the Yanks are coming..." and everyone else was singing "Oh the Yanks are bumming..." (especially the Canucks, who LOVE that stuff).
[And here we are, full of happytalk about our wonderful economy despite record homelessness, disability and incarceration, telling the Europeans they should can their social welfare bennies and trash their labor standards so they'll be just as schizoid as we. What beauties we are - beautiful self-deluders, that is.]

1/21  2 more clunkers -

1. US trade gap hits record $26.5b in Nov. - Fast pace of imports tied to hot economy, AP via Bos Globe, C2.
   [Or maybe it's the desperate downsized looking for goods cheap enough for them to afford? At any rate, it's clear that we no longer have any union "Buy American!" campaigns, probably because we no longer have any unions - they're stuck below 14% of the workforce (see first story below on 1/20) and neither major party is advocating for them. If only they hadn't sold their birthright (shorter hours = mechanism to avoid flooding the job market & clobbering bargaining power) for a mess of pottage (the "New Deal"). If only today they had the sense to drop the grocery list of side issues and cut to the chase = their historic mainline to bargaining power, overtime redesign (need complete reinvestment of overtime profits and earnings in training and hiring), enforcement, and augmentation via shorter hours. Timesizing.com advocates a 5-phase business-sector program followed by a 5-phase government-sector program for accomplishing this. Coincidentally enough, it's called Timesizing. The alternatives are war, famine, plague, genocide... you know, our usual "solutions" to the misalignment of population and livelihood. Call genocide by one of its old names, "the sword," and you get the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rev. 6).]

2. More working families seek food aid, study says, by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Boston Globe, B2.
   Despite continuing economic "boom" [our quotes, ed.], hunger is becoming such an acute problem that increasingly many working Americans must rely on soup kitchens and food banks to feed their families, according to a Tufts University study released yesterday.
   [And let's get another thing straight, right off the bat. Hunger is not the problem. Low pay is the problem. You never hear people with high pay complaining about hunger. Why is pay low? Because people are a surplus commodity relative to market-demanded jobs. Pay has been stagnant for 30 years for everyone except top executives and sports stars. Web wizards are doing OK right now in Silicon Valley but that will stop when high tech lobbies its way to floods of visas for pre-trained low-wage geeks from Bombay and Calcutta. We don't have a labor shortage, we have a skills shortage - a skills shortage in the midst of a huge and growing labor surplus. Employers are so spoiled by floods of resumes that they've stopped training, and any who are still uncompetitive enough to train cut the training budget first in any downturn. The solution? A steep tax on overtime with an exemption for reinvestment in training and hiring - and that means a reinvestment in pay - and that means a reinvestment in consumer spending and markets. And if we don't have enough overtime to solve the low pay problem, we make more by adjusting the workweek downward. And no more visas. We've got more than enough people right here to do the job - but they need training.]
   The report, by the university's Center on Hunger and Poverty, estimated that 67% of people who ask for food assistance nationwide are employed adults. In Massachusetts, nearly 500,000 people, many of them working, relied on regular assistance in order to eat in 1998 - a 22% increase from 1994. "The profile of hunger has changed quite dramatically in recent years," said Dr. J. Larry Brown, coauthor of the report. "What's so sad about this is that these people are playing by the rules, and...they still need help to get enough food."
   The report, compiled from local surveys across the nation since 1997, argued that government policies to reduce the welfare rolls have left many families in dire straits.... Sen. Edward M. Kennedy...is coauthor, with Sen. Arlen Spector [Pa.-R] of the Hunger Relief Act, a bill [awaiting vote] aimed at expanding the Food Stamp program and restructuring the formulas the federal government uses to determine who qualifies for assistance....
   [Thus bleeding-heart, too-little-too-late, over-controlling, micro-managing, paternalistic, humiliating, and ineffectual liberal bandaids roll on and on, while the glaringly obvious truth in the middle of the economy goes completely unseen - after 150 years of adjusting the workweek downward as our level of technology moved upward, we froze the workweek at the 40-hour level in 1940. We now have a workweek that is 60 years out of date. Our technology has saved all kinds of work, but we have taken those savings in the form of low pay and long hours for those who still have jobs, and for those who don't, record levels of underemployment uncounted by our unemployment rate, welfare, disability, homelessness and incarceration. And family violence, school shootings and suicide.
   [And yet our media, constantly consolidating in ownership, relentlessly drill into us that we're the best nation in the world, our way is best, and we have the best economy, the best quality of life and the highest standard of living. The media line is diverging more and more sharply from the bad conditions in our agriculture, health care, and manufacturing industries. Their blinders are getting as thick as we had throughout the Roaring Twenties as the Great Depression gestated under-reported and scarcely seen, or just as thick as those of Pravda and Izvestia in the days of the USSR. Just as they published little or nothing about the better conditions here during those years, now the American media are publishing little about the better conditions in Europe or elsewhere. One story that did slip through was about Danish prisons on 11/21/99.
   [We need to share the wealth by first sharing the work. And that means tuning up our overtime laws to stop time-and-a-half and just steeply tax overtime profits and earnings unless they are reinvested in overtime-targeted training and hiring. And when we've got that running smoothly, it probably means adjusting the workweek downward very gradually until pay starts rising for everyone, not just the rich, and money starts centrifuging out of stocks and into the consumer base. We call it Timesizing.
   [When we do that, we can completely dismantle as unnecessary our minimum wage laws, the food stamp program, welfare, disability, unemployment insurace, block grants, enterprise zones, industrial policy, NAFTA damage control, subsidized stadiums, the Mass. "single sales factor" taxbreak for Raytheons and Fidelity (see below, 1/16), and all the other bandaids and makework spawned since FDR's disastrous misperception of the Thirty Hour Work Week Bill that passed the U.S. Senate in 1933 as "socialist" and his subsequent fully dressed plunge into socialism àa la social security, minimum wage, workmen's comp, unemployment insurance, CCC, WPA, NRA, NIRA, TVA, on and on and on - and despite the massive media-hyped feelgood effects, none of which solved even half the Depression until the war. FDR expressed regret as early as 1935 that he had not just got behind the Thirty Hour Bill and pushed it through Congress when the political climate was right. It wasn't perfect. It was rigid, inflexible, arbitrary, disconnected, unidirectional, absolute, etc. etc. But we could at least have been tinkering in the right garage for the last 60 years instead of completely wasting our time on Micromanagement to Nowhere.]
   Elizabeth Cannon, who directs [food] pantries in Lowell and Haverhill [Mass.] says that many working poor families have such tight budgets that even the most momentary setback can send them back to the pantries.... A surging real estate market also is forcing many poor families to spend so much on housing that they don't have enough money left for food, said Suzanne Shaw, director of Project Bread....

1. '99 data show unions added 265,000 to rolls - Share of work force static at 13.9%, by Diane Lewis, Boston Globe, D2.
   [The NY Time's version of this is a lot more spindoctored -]
   Growth in unions' membership in 1999 was the best in two decades - Initial success in reversing the labor movement's long slide, by Steven Greenhouse, NYT, A10.
   [How much have they slid?]
   ...In the 1950's, unions represented 35% of the nation's work force, but last year they represented just 13.9% - a figure that remained unchanged from 1998....
   [Unions aren't going anywhere until they get back on their strategically central issue - controlling labor's overall supply&demand BY rationing its availability to the job market BY adjusting the workweek downwards as our level of technology shoots upwards. Walter Reuther called it "fluctuating adjustment of the workweek" and he tied it to technology by tying it to unemployment. (He would NOT regard our current 3.5-4% levels of unemployment as anything but alarmingly high.) We call it Timesizing.]

2. [And here's why we need to adjust our hours downward -]
   Roboboom, NYT, E3.
   ...According to the..\..new edition of the Handbook of Industrial Robots...the number of industrial robots (meaning any manufactured robot) has risen from 35,000 in 1982, to 677,000 in 1996, [to] an estimated 950,000 this year.
   [Sounds conservative.]
   The author...adds that attitudes have also changed as people no longer fear that robots will take away their jobs....
   [It took a LOT of spindoctoring (and Prozac?) to accomplish that coup, especially for bank employees laid off at the rate of 95,000/year 1995-2000 - and you don't even want to think about former factory employees.]

3. [Or here's what will continue to happen -]
   'Digital divide' could widen, by Adrian Walker, Bos Globe, B1.
   The 'digital divide' [is] the growing chasm between those who have computer access and know-how and those who lack it. Computer literacy is becoming what high school diplomas were to past generations, a ticket into the modern economy.
   More people lack entree than you might think, and that group is largely urban and minority. According to a US Commerce Dept. study released last August, among families earning $15,000-35,000 a year, 33% of whites owned computers, but only 19% of blacks. That gap had grown by 62% since 1994, despite plunging computer prices....

1. Report on hunger and obesity, pointer headline (to A10), NYT, A2.
   A study of global trends said the number of overweight people in the world now rivals the number of hungry, underfed people. The report says the two extremes are increasingly found in all societies, poor as well as rich....
   [What a metaphor for overtime in the midst of underemployment, astronomical executive pay and perks in the midst of stagnant wages for the vast majority in this so-called "boom"! Time for some balance.]

2. Boom turns border to speed bump - The Border Patrol's busiest spot is even busier than usual, by Sam Dillon, NYT, A4.
   ...Surge of undocumented immigration has overwhelmed a 26-mile stretch of the border with Mexico...near Douglas, Ariz.... [photo caption]
   [Maybe while Clinton's asking Congress for $280m to enforce our existing gun laws (see today's 1/18's goodnews, he should ask for an at-least equal amount to enforce our existing immigration laws, or, repeal them - let's "sh*t or get off the pot" on this. And as for which is the better way to go, we vote for Paul Ehrlich and his *Zero Population Growth. Contrary to the views of some liberals, we can't save the world by moving everybody here and ruining ourselves.]

1. 1/17 A nation in debt, Boston Globe, C7.
   
   • Last year, Americans charged up more than $400B on credit cards, incurring roughly $50B in finance charges.
   • ...The Federal Reserve [recently reported] that Americans...added approximately $143m a day to their credit-card balances.
   • ...The Consumer Federation of America \reported that\ Credit card solicitations increased...from 900m in 1992 \to\ 3.5B in 1998 [a jump of 289%].
   • ...[America now has] 6300..\..credit card...companies

2. 1/16 A cloud over the environment, by Robert Braile, Boston Globe, A14.
   [The only problem with this article is that Robert has diluted it with a lot of braindead comments from some really short-term thinkers, which makes it harder to get the info.]
   ...The world's ecological health at the dawn of the millennium is deteriorating, the *Worldwatch Institute concluded in its annual State of the World report...released yesterday....
   • Earth's temperature has risen 0.8°F. in 30 years, and glaciers have melted....
   • Extinction threatens 11% of bird species, 25% of mammal species, and 34% of fish species.
   • The world is pumping [up] 160B tons of [ground]water in China, India, North Africa, and the United States. This is more than aquifers can provide without running dry.
   • ...Global warming is causing more frequent and more damaging hurricanes...destructive in part because they cause mudslides [one of which] killed 10,000 people..\..in 1998 in Central America..\..
   If the population and climate are not stabilized, "there is not an ecosystem on Earth that we can save"..\..Worldwatch president, Lester Brown said. He urged a limit of two children per family and a faster transition to solar and wind power....

3. 1/16 Service with a shrug - Firms struggle to find, keep good employees, by Cindy Rodriguez, Bos Globe, front page.
   [And then we go through a whole article - we are not making this up - with NO MENTION OF RAISING WAGES. And the only two mentions of training are to the effect that it's inadequate. But fear not, the only industries mentioned in this article of bogus employer whining & media lip-syncing are fast foods and retail.]

4. 1/16 Has 'single-sales factor' done the job? - After four years, Mass. tax break difficult to measure, by Ross Kerber, Bos Globe, F1.
   [Translation: NO - we're talking about the dumb law that's been giving tax breaks to manufacturing companies like Raytheon (then how did Fidelity Investments get in on the gravy?!) who promise not to have any layoffs (Raytheon had 3,000 anyway). The companies clean up (saved them about $300m since '96) while downsizing rolls on regardless, because there's no enforcement.]

1. [1920s deja vu -]
   1/15/2k  Investing's longtime best bet is being trampled by the bulls, by Gretchen Morgenson, NYT, front page.
   Investing in the stock market for the long term, the strategy that has made the most sense and the most money for people over the years, is all but dead.... New numbers show the betting has become faster and more furious [on Wall Street] than at any time since the 1920's.
   Last year, investors held stocks for just over eight months on average, well short of the two years that was typical a decade ago, according to Sanford C. Bernstein, an investment research firm.... Nasdaq [was down to] five months.... Mutual funds [are down to under] four years [from] 11 years..\..a decade ago....
   The rapid-fire trading mentality of a very small group of hyperactive investors [let's call a spade a spade, these guys are speculators] known as day traders has altered the behavior of large numbers of investors and is seeping into the overall market.... The consequences are large, since studies show that investors who trade frequently get lower returns and heavy trading contributes to wide swings in the market....
   [We are watching the conditions line up once again for a huge crash, exactly as they did in the second half of the 1920s.]
   The trading in [Nasdaq] shares amounted to more than twice [200%] its entire share base; the turnover was [only] 88% in 1990. Steve Galbraith, a senior analyst at Sanford Bernstein in New York, [who] compiled the statistics...sees trouble in the trading frenzy. "It does look suspiciously like a game of musical chairs, and you do wonder when the music is going to stop," he said.
   [Oh, and here it is finally, - an analyst calls it by its true name -]
   "Because three-week holding periods is not investing in my view, it is speculating"....

2. [1930s deja vu -]
   Core inflation rate falls to 1.9% last year, the lowest since 1965, by John Berry, Washington Post via Boston Globe, C2.
   Consumer prices rose substantially more last year than in 1998, but all the acceleration...was because of sharply higher energy prices, and the nation's core inflation rate declined to 1.9%, the lowest since 1965, the Labor Dept. reported yesterday.... The core portion of the index...excludes volatile food and energy prices.... Said Bruce Steinberg, chief economist at Merrill Lynch & Co. in New York..."Even more eye-catching, consumer goods prices actually deflated last year. The CPI for goods, excluding food, energy and tobacco, fell 0.4% during 1999, even while consumer spending was jumping 5.5%....
   [...Financed by record consumer debt?]
   "We expect any slowdown in consumer demand to lead to even more price discounting"....
   [Again, what's here being called "discounting" can also be called deflation, and deflation was a big feature of the Great Depression. The prevailing nonsense from economists is that human desires are infinite, but when you crowd all the spending power onto a tiny minority of the population, you soon see that there's a limit to the spending of people who already have everything - everything but free time. The Timesizing program balances this split between people with money and no time, and people with time and no money.]

1. AOL and Time Warner share prices rebound - The online company hopes investors will look past its lack of profit, by Saul Hansell, NYT, C2.
   [The bad news is, they probably will, judging from their enthusiasm for stocks in web companies that not only have a past lack of profit but have no profit prospects in the foreseeable future!  THAT is what changes them from 'investors' to speculators and Ponzi-scheme artists.]

2. Pay disparity widens for Mass. workers, by Kimberly Blanton, Boston Globe, C5.
   ...according to a state-by-state analysis of US Census income data by two liberal Washington think tanks, the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Massaschusetts workers earning incomes in the middle fifth of all workers have declined 4%, or about $2550 since the late 1980s, while those earning income in the top fifth are up 8%, or $12,000 over the same period. Figures are inflation adjusted; an average of incomes for three years, 1988-90, were compared to...1996-98.

1. Questions abound as media influence grows for a handful... - [photo caption:] Ralph Nader is dismayed by the America Online-Time Warner deal, by Laurence Zuckerman, NYT, C6.
   In 1983, Ben H. Bagdikian, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaperman, wrote in his book "The Media Monopoly" (Beacon Press) that a mere 50 companies controlled most of what Americans read in books, magazines and newspapers and watched on television and at the movies.
   For the book's sixth edition due in March, that number has shrunk to 6.  "Every edition has been considered by some to be alarmist," Mr. Bagdikian said on Monday from his home in Berkeley, Calif., "and every edition ends up being too conservative."
   Paradoxically, the public debate over the power of Big Media seems to have grown quieter....
   [What's paradoxical about that? It's exactly what you'd expect if our worst fears are true and media concentration subtly stifles a healthy diversity of opinion.]
   Critics also say that Wall Street is not likely to stop the trend since it...profits handsomely from the corporate deals....
   [Case in point -]
   Firms' multimillion-dollar fees for big merger are just a start, Bloomberg via NYT, C6.
   ...$50m each....

2. [2 more angles on media bias in 1 article -]
   Cartoonists take shots at UN contest - 'World's leading cartoonist' or 'self-promoter'?, by Mark Jurkowitz, Bos Globe, F1.
   [Evidently the UN, of all agencies, is holding a $10K contest for political cartoonists named after a virtually unknown political cartoonist hyped as "world's leading" and containing a contest rule that...]
   ...Entries "should not malign member nations or their leaders....
   [Sounds like a plot to kill political cartooning to us.]
   The idea that cartoonists - who often function as bomb-lobbing iconoclasts - should make nice with world leaders doesn't sit too well....
   [And if you think that's bad, check out the runt article that's folded in at the end of this one without even a blowout header, on the last page of Sec. F.]
   ...Welcome to an overlooked implication of the world of new media and mergers. Are journalists [themselves] now so invested in the boom economy that they can no longer objectively report on that subject?..\..
   [Considering it's not a boom economy for 25% of Massachusetts families, for Massachusetts outside the 495 beltway, for American agriculture, for nearly 2 million Americans in jails and prisons, we'd say Hell Yes!]
   The New York Post reported that "between 1,000 and 2,000 of the 12,000 employees at TIme Inc. alone are worth more than $1m or more in Time Warner stock"..\.. Salon magazine quoted one People magazine staffer saying that "everyone has their calculators on their desk," recalibrating the value of their 401Ks....
   "The AOL Time Warner merger...now adds another dimension to the notion of media bias.
   Can journalists avoid conflicts of economic interest?" writes Trevor Butterworth in a shrewd essay for Newswatch, the on-line media site produced by the Center for Media and Public Affairs....

3. 25% of Mass. families struggling - Study: US poverty level understates living costs, by Kimberly Blanton, Boston Globe, C1.
   With the nation entering the ninth year of an economic boom, one in four Massachusetts families still do not earn enough to pay for the rising costs of housing, child care, and health care, according to a study released yesterday. The study, sponsored by the Women's Educational and Industrial Union [WEIU], portrayed the federal government's poverty level - $16,700 a year for a family of four - as an outmoded measure of what it takes to support a basic standard of living.... The poverty level was determined roughly by estimating the cost of feeding a family and multiplying it by three. It was established in the 1960s [before the World War II labor shortage had worn off and] before women [and babyboomers] entered the work force in droves and families began [having to pay] for child care... The federal poverty line "dramatically underestimates how many families are struggling"..\..said former labor minister Robert Reich..\..
   WEIU's "sufficiency" incomes range from $15,888 a year for a single adult living in Boston to nearly $43,000 for a Boston family with one toddler and one child in school.... "In this wonderful, buoyant Nasdaq economy, most of the gains have gone to the top," said...Reich. The standard of living for typical wage earners..."is actually going nowhere...."
   [We went through exactly this kind of "boom" in the 1920s and we have movies of that period. How many times are we going to have to go through this before we learn the lesson and implement a flexible work sharing plan, such as Timesizing?]

1. AT&T to cut benefits to 50,000 managers, by Levenson and Berr, Bloomberg via Bos Globe, A12.
   ...a third of its workforce - as chief executive C. Michael Armstrong works to cut $2 billion in costs....
   [It's as if CEOs are trying to find out how much of everybody else's incentive they can cut to boost how much of their own. You know capitalism is losing it when its forte, incentive, becomes more and more narrowly restricted.]

2. Good riddance to the 20th century, letter by Scott Wolfe of Worcester MA, Bos Globe, A15.
   ...Let's see, there were two world wars, a Great Depression, Naziism, Communism, Fascism, all sorts of various genocides, the Cold War, the constant threat of nuclear war (and ultimately the extinction of all mankind), biological warfare, and without question, more violence - much more violence - in the 20th century than any century....
   [Violence, e.g., murders/genocides/wardeaths, as a percentage of world population, was probably worse in many previous centuries. What was unquestionably greater in the 20th century was the publicity that violence drew, per Buckminster Fuller's "spreading, world-around, electronic nervous system" - thus giving us the impression of " much more violence."
   [We're not experts on the 19th century, but there were at least 3 great depressions (1826..., 1877..., 1893...), two world wars (Napoleon I and II), 4 bloody regional wars (Crimean, US Civil, French-Prussian, US Spanish), a devastating famine (Ireland), and nobody's even collected the genocides, plagues, -isms, new weaponry (e.g., six-shooters, Gatling guns, ironclads, dreadnoughts,...) .]
   The 21st century cannot be as bad.
   [Ooooh yes, it can. Easily. And easily worse, much worse. We have no guarantees except our own responsibility and design smarts.]
   I hope it will be better and more compassionate.
   [We're with you on that, Scott. That's why we're attacking the biggest source of human misery, - our naive working assumption that no one wants more than his share, or even that s/he knows what it should be. Our long-term economic design for Timesizing and its successor programs is specially tailored to solve this answer this question and solve this problem, which G. K. Chesterton identified most engagingly.]

1. [PricewaterhouseCoopers has recently been caught deliberately falsifying company audits.]
   Rules that only an accountant could fail to understand?, by Floyd Norris, NYT, B1.
   In 1931, the American Institute of Accountants heard a plea from its immediate past president that auditors not be officers or directors of the companies whose books they were certifying...to preserve public confidence in the integrity of financial statements.... "We have too many rules already," one accountant complained. "...I think [the resolution] is far too broad and sweeping," another said. "It is dangerous because it would prevent...a perfectly proper relationship that might come under it ethically." In the end, the proposal was shelved. "The profession," wrote John Carey in...The Rise [and Fall??] of the Accounting Profession, "had missed a chance to take a forward step voluntarily."
   [So much for "self-policing." This is a big foreshadowing of the Enron debacle later this year.]
   As a result, the first rules on that question were imposed in 1933 by the Federal Trade Commission, which administered the first federal securities law until the Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] was created in 1934. That rule barred auditors from investing in companies that they audited, as well as barring them from being officers or directors of those companies. Those rules have continued in force for nearly seven decades.... Details have been added, buy the principle has never changed....
   [OK, Floyd, tell us this: how come you're not calling these rules an outdated "Depression-era law" like your colleague Steve Labaton called the Glass-Steagall banking legislation (7/02/1999 #2) that kept banks, brokerages and insurance companies separate, and that have just been repealed? After all, conflict of interest is conflict of interest, and "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." Especially in view of the PricewaterhouseCoopers case -]
   At the world's largest accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, a report released by the SEC on Thursday concluded that the vast majority of partners had violated the rules. Partners pleaded that the rules were too complicated and said they had not understood them....
   [Accountants pleading that the rules were too complicated - with our tax code? Riiight!!!]

1. Growing number of companies choose not to offer dividends
   - Trend also reflects a shift in investors' outlook
   [shouldn't that read "Trend also reflects admission of pervasive speculation"?!?],
   by Floyd Norris, NYT, front page.
   A growing portion of corporate America appears to be concluding that dividends are no longer needed to attract investors and are therefore an unnecessary cost of doing business....
   [The distortion of the pre-depression economy continues. So much profit, uncommanded by weak labor leverage, is being funnelled to the top that the wealthy have nowhere else to put it but the financial markets. This trend is exactly parallel to "A growing portion of corporate America appears to be concluding that good wages, benefits and training are no longer needed to attract employees and are therefore an unnecessary cost of doing business" - because so much labor-saving technology is being injected into the economy without corresponding adjustments in the workweek, that labor is funnelling into unemployment, welfare, disability, homelessness, suicide and prison. The alternative is timesizing, not downsizing.]

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