DoomwatchTM vs. Timesizing®
Collapse trends - Nov. 1-15, 2001
[Commentary] ©2001 Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

11/15/2001  symptoms du jour -
  1. Britain: Unemployment rises, by Alan Cowell, NYT, W1.
    For the first time since last year, British joblessness rose last month...to 3.2%...compared with 3.1% in September, still the lowest in major industrialized nations, according to government figures..\..
    [How DO they do it, sez you? Evidently they're even better than we are at lightening the already rose-colored glasses with which some governments keep down their unemployment rates. The story hints at this slight-of-hand -]
    ...[British] unemployment [is] measured as the number of people out of work and claiming benefits....
    [So just raise the criteria for collecting benefits and cut the length of time people can collect them, and presto, low unemployment! Great for incumbent politicians! Say, anybody got a handle on what's happening lately in the erstwhile depressed north of England? Give us a jingle at timesizing@aol.com ]

  2. More signs of downturn for Europe - Layoffs and losses across the Continent, by Edmund Andrews, NYT, W1.
    They are not using the word recession yet, but...in Germany, five economic institutes that advise the government released their most pessimistic forecasts yet for the nation, Europe's biggest economy, in the coming year.... Unemployment is rising across the Continent, while investment has declined sharply and consumer spending is anemic.
    [Except in France? They tend not to mention France in these "Europe - bad!" stories. France is so embarrassing. A shorter workweek and more consumer spending does not compute in the sweating, megahour, "I'm overworked therefore I'm important" brains of the English-language media.]
    Export growth has ground to a halt, even thought the euro remains cheap compared with the dollar.... Chemical producers like BASF [German] have been hurt badly by plunging demand for chemicals used to make plastics. Vendors of luxury goods [e.g., Bulgari (Italian)] and high-fashion clothing have been hurt by consumer anxiety.... Airlines [e.g., Spanish, Swiss, Belgian, German] and tourism companies are dealing with widespread fear of flying.... For companies that already had problems of their own making [e.g., Bayer (German)], the situation is worse....

11/11/2001  ominous revelation - 11/10/2001  "tokens of the plague" -
  1. Wholesale prices in major decline, pointer digest (to C14), NYT, C1.
    Wholesale prices fell 1.6%, the biggest decline since records were started in 1947, according to the Labor Dept.
    [So this is effectively the biggest decline since the start of the Great Depression. And don't think we're gonna get out of this one without a huge war or - timesizing our way to flexible work sharing and continuous training.]

  2. Change ahead as Taiwan enters WTO - From price of rice wine to ties with mainland, by Mark Landler, NYT, C1.
    [Lucky Taiwan - now it too can get its economy reamed by the global 'captains of industry.']
    The lines started forming all over Taiwan on Thursday. People mobbed supermarkets and corner stores to buy bottles of rice wine, a potent brew essential to Taiwanese cooking. The price of the wine will increase fivefold after Taiwan enters the World Trade Organization, because under the terms of its membership the government must dismantle the monopoly that has controlled prices....
    [Can anyone explain to us what's the objection to a "monopoly" that keeps prices down?! The only problematic monopolies are the ones that keep prices up, and if this is one of the effects of so-called "free" trade, it's functioning worse than a monopoly, sort of like the breakup of AT&T, California energy utilities, etc. etc. If only economics were as simple as the "free" traders and laissez-fairers would have us believe.... but these terms are just a cover for spreading tentacular/testicular control by them.]

11/08/2001  tokens of the plague -
  1. U.N. says 4 billion will be living in hunger in 2050, NYT, A12.
    UNITED NATIONS...- The world population stands at 6.1 billion, double what it was in 1960, and is projected to reach 9.3 billion by 2050, the United Nations Population Fund reported [yester]day in its annual report.... The report said 2B people already lacked sufficient food, and water use has increased six times over the past 70 years. By 2050, it said, 4.2B people would be living in countries where their basic needs could not be met. "The report shows that poverty and rapid population growth are a deadly combination," the executive director of the fund, Thoraya Obaid, said at a briefing....
    "The world's wealth is some $30 trillion, but half the world lives on $2 a day or less," she said.... The report called for universal education, basic health care and specific actions to empower women to have only the number of children they want.
    [Amazing how blithely the UN ignores the fact that people who are well employed do not starve. The UN therefore ignores the need to share technology-eroded market-demanded work, and is quite innocent of designs to accomplish such sharing on a flexible and market-oriented basis, designs such as Timesizing. But then, the UN has long been a place of prestigious employment for the privileged from around the world, where they can interminably talk as if they are concerned about the world's problems. But somehow never solve any of them. Sort of like economists the world over. And politicians.]

  2. Layoff practices linked to brand damage, Andersen survey shows, PRNewswire 11/07/2001 10:00 EST via AOLNews.
    [The headline promises more than the article delivers.]
    CHICAGO...- Andersen [yester]day announced the results of a survey, conducted in conjunction with Vault, Inc., that shows the way companies handle layoffs impacts their corporate brand as well as their future ability to attract employees. The key findings from the national online survey of over 1,200 recently laid-off workers include:

11/07/2001  symptom-signalling headlines -
  1. 10th Fed rate cut this year raises hopes for a recovery, by Floyd Norris, NYT, front page.
    [Nine didn't do it. Why should another? In Japan, even rates reduced to zero haven't triggered recovery. This is a far over-rated (no pun) nostrum that should be taken from the Fed and given to regular public referendum. After a certain point in rate reduction, the effect switches over from motivating more 40h/wk job-creating business borrowing to motivating less bank lending - why take on lending risk for nothing? Plus anyone on fixed, rate-dependent incomes stops spending and worsens the downturn. Past a certain point the only familiar "tool" that works is 40h/wk job-creating militarization. But when even that becomes too expensive or dangerous, we're left with a much-denied, much-resisted, now-unfamiliar but long-traditional tool that targets the nub of the problem, cutting the "full time" workweek to match our technology level and thereby sharing the vanishing work and spreading the funneling income. We call it Timesizing. It allows the dismantling of all of government's other interventions in the economy, which are, one way or another, jobs programs, and pretty ineffectual ones at that.]

  2. U.S. acts to stop assisted suicides - Ashcroft order is aimed at law approved by Oregon voters, by Sam Verhovek, NYT, front page.
    Taking square aim at a measure approved twice by voters in Oregon, Atty. Gen. John ["Mr. Taliban America"] Ashcroft authorized federal agents yesterday to take action against doctors who prescribe lethal drugs for terminally ill patients....
    [So much for the "Land of the Free." Can't even die with dignity in this self-described "advanced" nation whose leadership has been usurped by busybody religious fundamentalists with brains in the 9th century like the Taliban. Any nation that is not free for a dignified death isn't free for a dignified life, or ready for the big switch from quantity to quality.]
    Oregon is the only state in the nation and one of the few places in the world where people are allowed to kill themselves with a doctor's prescription. Under the state's...Death with Dignity Act, a terminally ill patient may take the lethal drugs if two doctors agree the person has less than six months to live and is mentally competent to make the decision to end his or her life.
    Since the law went into effect in 1997, at least 70 people have [ended their lives] in this way.... Many more have obtained lethal prescriptions but have died of natural causes before taking the drugs. ...Reversing the policy of the Clinton administration, [Herr Aschkroft said assisted suicide ist nicht ein "legitimate medikal purpose" für prescribing oder handing out drugs.]
    Oregon officials said they would go to court today to try to block the order, and even those who said they were personally opposed to physician-assisted suicide generally responded with outrage to an action in the nation's capital that so clearly undercuts the expressed will of [a] state's voters....
    [...let alone state's rights, to which these hypocrites pay such relentless lip service.]
    Several said it flew in the face of the Busch administration's avowed interest in upholding the rights of states to make their own decisions on most policy matters.... "They've tossed the ballots of Oregon voters in the trash can," Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat, said in a telephone interview.
    [Just like they did in Flori-duh last year.]
    "They're frustrated by the inconvenience of the democratic process...."
    Other critics of the decision predicted that it could have broad negative ramifications for doctors and seriously ill patients far beyond Oregon because it would allow federal law enforcement agents to "second-guess" any doctor who prescribes medication to relieve pain. ...It also clearly angered many Oregonians and others who feel physician-assisted suicide is precisely the kind of issue that should be decided at the state level.
    In 1994, Oregonians passionately debated and narrowly approved a measure making theirs the first state to legalize physician-assisted suicide. Two years later, amid legal challenges, the state's voters decided to reaffirm it by a margin of 60% to 40%.
    Opponents of doctor-assisted suicide passed a measure in the U.S. House of Representatives two years ago that would have effectively overturned the Oregon law, but it never came to a vote in the Senate.  Sen. Wyden, who says he voted twice against the Oregon initiative and is personally opposed to physician-assisted suicide, nonetheless led the fight to block the House bill because, he said, he objected to federal interference with the will of his state's voters....
    Advocates of the law, along with Oregon officials, contend that Mr. Ashcroft has grossly exceeded the terms of the federal controlled-substances law.... The state's governor, John Kitzhaber, a Democrat....said yesterday..."Given everything that the country is going through right now..., why John Ashcroft picked this moment to inject this divisive issue into the public debate is just beyond me."
    [Because he's incompetent and should be replaced. His repeated fear-mongering alarmism interspersed with advice to "stay calm" are more-than-sufficient demonstration.]

11/06/2001  symptom-signalling headlines -
  1. US Treasuries increase as nonmanufacturing business slumps, Bloomberg via NYT, C8.
    ...add[ing] to the evidence [if you needed it] that the economy has fallen into a recession....

  2. Britain: Production level drop, by Alan Cowell, NYT, W1.
    ...sharpest drop in four years....

11/04-05/2001  symptom-signalling headlines this weekend -
  1. 11/04   We've seen worse times, and we didn't learn, Steven Syre & Charles Stein, BG, E1.
    The economic news is bleak.
    The American economy shrank in Q3. In Oct., more than 400,000 jobs disappeared.
    But...the recession that struck Massachusetts in the late 1980s and early 1990s came to be called the "Great Recession" because it was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression....
    [But it was just one state.]
    How bad was the "Great Recession" [of Massachusetts]?
    Between 1989 and 1992 Massachusetts lost 11% of its jobs compared to less than 2% for the country..\.. The [bad-loan] weakened banks infected the rest of the business community by triggering a credit crunch..\.. Just after New Year's 1991, one of Boston's biggest banks, the Bank of New England, was taken over by the government. Lawrence Fish...was brought in to try to save [it].... Construction employment [in Mass.] fell from 150,000 to 65,000. Home prices dropped an average of 20%....
    A great many things are [better] this time around.... "The banks are in awfully good shape," said Fish, now CEO of Citizens Financial Group, the second-largest bank in New England... [less] exposure to the real estate sector [and only] about 1% of its assets in the nonperforming category. State government...has more than $2B in..\..a rainy day fund..\.. In the late 1980s, [it] had [only] $100m.
    Another key distinction: In the early 1990s, Massachusetts and New England were on their own. Because the recession here was so much worse than the national downturn, the region got very little help from the federal government in the form of fiscal or monetary relief.
    [This cuts both ways. In the early 90s when the rest of the nation and the world were in better economic shape, they could pull Mass. up. Today they aren't and can't.]
    This time we are in the same boat as the nation [and the world - a so-called 'synchronous downturn']. When Washington acts, by cutting rates or cutting taxes, Massachusetts should share in the benefits....
    [That assumes that cutting rates is something more than cosmetic, which it isn't, and that cutting taxes is something more than voodoo economics, which it isn't. Clearly Syre and Stein have learned nothing from the early 90s or from 1929-42. So what are they talking about when they say in their title, "and we didn't learn"? Merely that -]
    During the miracle years, people assumed the good times would go on forever. In the 1980s, they put their faith in the service economy.
    [And in the Laffer/Phillips Curve where you cut taxes and you actually get more tax revenues - not. But somehow cutting taxes has imprinted itself on Syre&Stein's limited brains as a big recession-fighting tool - which is reeediculous. They not only have learned nothing from the late 80s-early 90s - they've learned misinformation.]
    In the late 1990s, they worshiped the new economy, which was supposed to offer the same protection.
    [Yeah, right. The "new" economy where you can invest without needing profits. This so-called new economy sounds a lot like old financial bubbles. The South Sea Bubble in 1719-20 was the defining one.]
    In both cases, excessive faith in the economy's powers led to irrational exuberance...
    [More like, naive faith that the economy, like the oceans, could absorb an infinite amount of abuse, leading to irrational and insulated independence and self-absorption to the point of cruelty - in terms of mass layoffs and buying the stocks of firms that practiced them.]
    ...and [to] some stupid decisions. In the 1980s in Mass., we built too many office buildings. In the 1990s nationally we bought too many computers and too much telecom gear....
    [Here's where Syre and Stein really get stupid. We are now in a classic crisis of under-consumption and inadequate effective demand, and they're trying to tell us our previous high level of purchasing brought this about? What planet do they come from?]
    How does the old folk song go? "When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?"
    [Answer: Maybe when Syre and Stein themselves learn and start publishing analyses a little deeper than the received pablum dba wisdom. The overall problem of the last 200 years has been the introduction of work-saving technology without corresponding and preferably automatic reductions in worktime per person. Result? The Ford-Reuther paradox - Ford, "Let's see you unionize these robots!" Reuther, "Let's see you sell them cars." So, a continuous and cumulative tendency to trim jobs instead of working hours and a resulting over-concentration of spending power in unspendable profusion among the top brackets. In short, a continuous and cumulative tendency to downturn, recession and depression, with the only relief in terms of the mass kill-offs of war and plague, or the mass withdrawal of manhours from the job market via workweek reduction. The most flexible and market-oriented (so far) design for doing it? Timesizing.]

  2. [The whole misguided search for efficiency, misguided because when you apply it to payroll you ruin your own markets, is reflected in this story -]
    11/05   The elusive search for efficiency, by Saul Hansell, NYT, F1.
    [The only possible way of judging efficiency in a work-saving high-tech world is by the criterion of how much financially secure free time everyone has - else you're cutting jobs and markets - and by the free-time criterion, the USA is the least efficient economy in the developed world, because our annual working hours have recently exceeded even those of Japan. Yet look at the ignorance reflected in the subtitle to this article -]
    As the economy slumps, Web plans are sidetracked - except those that make difficult jobs cheaper and easier.
    [Absolutely no awareness that as jobs become "cheaper" and less income goes to the average joe and jane, more goes to the top brackets who don't spend it and markets dwindle. So the whole thrust of this article is to worsen the downturn. Dumb dumb dumb. But what, you ask, can raise wages by market forces? Answer: a general shortage of manhours, a statewide, regionwide, nationwide, worldwide scarcity of labor. And how have we done that in the past. Most effectively and deliberately by war. Secondly by emigration (not the US of course, which is the big patsy, oops, happy recipient of much of this emigration). Quite effectively but unintentionally by plague, e.g., the flu epidemic of 1918-19 (see mortality notes in 11/29-12/01/2003 #6). Always conflictedly but backup-effectively by cutting the workweek (e.g., from over 80 hrs to officially 40 hrs between 1776 and 1940 as the Industrial Revolution came in). It is this last approach that we have developed into a powerful, gradual, flexible and market-oriented strategy in Timesizing, which is essentially just a new technology of sharing - in this case, sharing the vanishing human employment. Prime example of self-defeating efficiency from this article? -]
    ...Now that Delta is laying off thousands of phone agents, it wants to make sure the ones who are left are free to talk to customers who might pay for a ticket....
    [Supposedly Delta's new website for frequent-flier reservations is going to accomplish this miracle. Iin actuality, it will probably be another case of "overload those left" until they quit in disgust.]

11/03/2001  symptom-signalling headlines -
  1. Unemployment jumps to 5.4%, a 5-year high, by Louis Uchitelle, NYT, front page. [compare -]
    A mainstay of U.S. job creation is hit hard by Sept. 11, by Mary Walsh, NYT, C1.
    ...The services sector, which has been America's main engine of job creation since World War II....
    [Oh? We thought it was small business. But in terms of sectors, it could hardly have been mfg or farming.]

  2. Canada: Joblessness touches 7.3%, by Bernard Simon, NYT, C2.
    ...highest level in two years....

  3. Ireland: Jobs data may worsen, by Brian Lavery, NYT, C2.
    ...rose to 3.9% in Oct. ...People claiming unemployment benefits rose by 2,600 over the previous year, the first annual increase since 1996. ...The new figures...do not include the 1,200 jobcuts announced on Wed. in a range of industries from mining to mfg. Nor do they include more than 2,000 jobcuts planned at Aer Lingus....

  4. Quebec mobilizes for a major Keynesian stimulus, by William Watson, Financial Post of Canada, FP11.
    [Ah, didn't we explode that one in the 1930s? Yes, but the Keynesians (taxers and spenders) took credit for what World War II actually accomplished, the end of the Great Depression, by creating such a labor "shortage" (or rather, balance at last) that market forces drove up wages and benefits, centrifuged income out of the unimaginable (and unspendable) concentration it had fallen into during the 1920s, restored markets (demand) and production (supply), and the rising tide lifted all boats. But here we are, still talking about a Keynesian "stimulus" package in the USA - under the GOP yet, in Quebec, in Japan - indeed, all over the world. The effective solution of work&income spreading via workweek reduction still goes ignored, except in France (so Québec should know better!), but even in France it is much misunderstood and applied in only a most rigid, arbitrary, primitive and inconsistent way (for example, the government is applying it to themselves LAST! - quels stupides!)

  5. Analysts worry of ripple effect in Argentina's latest debt plan, by Jonathan Fuerbringer, NYT, C1.
    ...So far, there have not been too many ripples beyond the impact on Argentina's neighbor, Brazil.... The issue of whether Argentina defaults during its effort to restructure as much as $95B in bonds held by Argentinian banks and institutions and foreigners is complicated by the definition of what is a default....
    [Hoooboy.]
    ...Beyond all of that, any recovery for Argentina depends on turning the economy around, a task that has become even more difficult since the terrorist attack on the U.S....
11/02/2001  symptom-signalling headlines -
  1. [work hogs next to work starved]
    New York Police overtime soars: Extra pay may speed retirement, by Kevin Flynn, NYT, front page.
    The NY Police Dept. expects to pay up to $1.7B in overtime this fiscal year, a sum more than five times the record overtime it paid last year to officers who worked extra hours or extra shifts....
    [Under Timesizing, every incidence of overtime triggers training and/or hiring. "No overtime alone." No overtime goes without activating its own resolution. It's nature's own self-regulating way. The more of this careless overtime amidst under-employment that we tolerate, the longer and deeper will be our recessions.]

  2. [remember the glorious Fleet-BankBoston takeover ( 3/15/1999)? - here's the 'rrrest of the story' -]
    When 1 + 1 = less than 1  - The math has not worked out as Murray and Gifford had promised, by Steve Bailey, BG, E1.
    Fleet combining with BankBoston? At that first packed news conference, when we were all still trying to digest the fact that the deal that always seemed so unthinkable was happening right before us...
    [and our antitrust trustees were so utterly ball-less...]
    Fleet's Terry Murray and his onetime rival at BankBoston [and new boytoy], Chad Gifford, pushed a theme designed to allay concerns about the merger of our two dominant banks:
    "1 + 1 is greater than 2."
    The point, they repeated, was that their merged institutions would be able to do more for the stockholders...
    [with the most short-term, least inherently interested group, placed first, we've identified the problem right there....]
    the customers, and the communities they served [notice no mention at all of employees] than the two banks had been able to do alone.
    Now, 2½ years later...measured by one of the most basic of all banking functions - providing mortgages to its local market - the math has not worked out as Murray and Gifford had promised. 1 + 1? When it comes to mortgages, the answer has been less than 1 as a result of the Fleet-BankBoston meger.
    Go to the numbers. In 1999, Fleet and BankBoston made 1,006 mortgage loans in the City of Boston, according to data filed with the federal government. In 2000, the first full year of the merger, the combined banks made just 452 [mortgage] loans, a 55% drop [within Boston]. Statewide, the story was the same: [mortgage] lending by the [separate-to-merged] banks dropped from 5,352 in 1999 to 3,567 the following year, a 33% decline....
    [How many repeated 'learnings the hard way' does our supposedly intelligent species have to go through before we get the point that mergers and acquisitions are generally long-term disasters, and should be completely banned. Let companies rise and fall on their own, period. Let CEOs get their rocks off in bed with the opposite (or the same, what the heck) sex, like the rest of us, and not by raping other, often perfectly successful, companies or corporate empires. We've come to this conclusion in terms of international affairs - i.e., quit the aggression. It's time we came to the same conclusion in inter-corporate relations. And "incidentally," it would also put the cork in this one huge source of market-bashing, downturn-inducing mass layoffs.]

  3. [and speaking of antitrust with no balls -]
    Hammering out the details - Prosectors, Microsoft negotiators face deadline on settlement, by Howe and Denniston, BG, E1.
    ...a deal that still must win support from 18 state attorneys general...
    [they are now our only hope]
    and is already being lambasted by Microsoft critics as a sellout by the Bush administration....
    [and right underneath it -]
    Friends, foes see no change, by Hiawatha Bray, BG, E1.
    The case of United States v. Microsoft Corp. was supposed to change everything. By taking on the software behemoth in the biggest antitrust dispute in 100 years [when gutsy and ballsy Teddy Roosevelt took on big oil and big everything else - and won - and so did we all], the Justice Dept. sought to [break up] a multibillion-dollar monopoly and transform one of America's most important industries [back into the kind of level playing field that allowed Bill Gates to rise in the first place].
    But [now] four years after the case began, Microsoft remains the richest and most powerful software company on earth.
    [And by admitting that the proper channels to balance things don't work, we have in effect declared that anyone who wants a level playing field and greater diversity must use improper channels, among which lurk such alternatives as terrorism.]
    And the terms of a proposal to settle the case will probably do nothing to change this, say those on both sides of the dispute.... [Basically, Bill Gates has created an environment in which he could not possibly have done what he did and...there will be no further Bill Gates's and no further giant steps forward in software unless our attorneys general have the balls that the Bush league lacks - except when it's bombing the rubble around in a devastated little country. Gates just doesn't get it. He has $50+ billion and he's absolutely certain he knows it all. Never mind Bronowsky's and Galbraith's warnings about the dangers of absolute certainty - the kind of certainty Hitler etc. had. Compare tomorrow's headline in Canada's Financial Post -]
    Microsoft 'victorious' in antitrust tussle - 'Let's not pretend this will restore competition,' analyst, 11/03/2001 FP, front page.]

For earlier collapse stories, click on the desired date -
  • Oct/2001.
  • Sep.15-30/2001.
  • Sep.1-15/2001.
  • Aug/2001.
  • July/2001.
  • June/2001.
  • Apr-May/2001.
  • Mar/2001.
  • Feb/2001.
  • Jan/2001.
  • Dec.21-31/2000.
  • Dec.11-20/2000.
  • Dec.1-10/2000.
        Earlier Y2000 months accessible via links at bottom of Dec.1-10/2000 page.
  • Dec.16-31/99.
  • Dec.1-15/99.
        Earlier 1999 months accessible via links at bottom of Dec.1-15/99 page.
  • Dec/98.
        Earlier months accessible via links at bottom of Dec/98 page.

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