Timesizing® Associates

Good News Aug. 16-31, 1999
[Commentary] ©1998,1999 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

[One UPsizing - ]
8/31/99 People's Bank to open 30 branches in Conn., AP via Boston Globe, D9.
...in an attempt to generate $1.2 billion in new deposits over the next five years. People's had considered bidding on some of the branches divested in the Fleet/BannkBoston merger, but opted to open its own new branches because of customer demand and financial considerations.... Most of the new branches would be in Hartford and New Haven counties.
[Sounds like more jobs!]

8/29-30  4 goodnews factoids -

  1. [One UNtakeover - ]
    8/30 Standing apart in France, banks appear vulnerable - With a 3-way deal dead, much talk of bank marauders from outside, by John Tagliabue, NYT, C2.
    It was after 4 A.M. in Paris on Saturday when French bank regulators voted to end on of the most bruising corporate takeover brawls in many people's memories by refusing to allow Banque Nationale de Paris to retain its shares in its rival, Société Générale....

  2. 8/30 Economists hatch a disaster, by William Pfaff, Bos Globe, A17.
    [Hey, when the UN finally admits it, everybody's admitting it.]
    Those who doubt the power of ideas [make that "stupidity" in this case] will learn something from the new report on the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe issued by the UN Development Program, the world's largest agency for multilateral development cooperation.
    The report, possiblly the harshest ever issued by a UN authority, says that the Western-led effort to transform the former Soviet bloc's economies by means of wholesale privatization has plunged more than 100 million people into dire poverty and stripped millions more of economic security....
    This was done on the advice of the Western community of professional economists in universities, international agencies, and governments.
     [Stupidity, thy name is Jeffrey Sachs. See 8/15 story "Who lost Russia?" on our Collapse trends page.]
    There were arguments among the professionals for [and] against "big bang' privatization - doing it all at once and leaving the surviviors to sink or swim. Few - if any - economists [we can name only Stiglitz] argued that the Soviet-style state and its industry should be carefully dismantled in stages, with empirical attention to the consequences, above all, for the public....
     [A sudden "cure" for a large system is definitely worse than the disease. This was a major problem with the 30-hour workweek bill that passed the US Senate on April 6, 1933 and with the theoretical model that underpinned it, the two-week jump to a 20-hour workweek that Dahlberg recommended in 1932 (in "Jobs, Machines and Capitalism"). The FLSA of 1938 had the right idea in bringing the workweek down just two hours a year (from 44 in 1938 to 40 in 1940, but unfortunately it stopped at that irrelevantly high level). We have learned this lesson in our design of Timesizing. "Gradualism" in all things. "Make no sudden moves."]

  3. 8/29 Greenspan weighs in on options and earnings, by Richard Teitelbaum, NYT, 3:6.
    Do stock options distort corporate earnings? Many critics have long made the case that they do. On Friday, the Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, said he agreed.
    [Phew!  Glad we finally got that settled!]
    "The combination of not charging their fair value against income and the practice of periodically repricing those options that fall significantly out of the money serves to understate ongoing compensation charges against corporate earnings," Mr. Geenspan said. That, of course, results in higher reported earnings.
    In a speech at a confernce of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyo. Mr. Greenspan also aid the Fed calculates that distortions associated with the repricing and valuation of options have overstated the growth of reported coporate profits by 1-2 percentage points a year over the past five years.
    So is corporate profit growth being wildly overstated. Probably not. Mr. Greenspan said that the widespread undercapitalization of expenses - that is, treating as one-time expenses those expenditures that ought to be amortized over several years - is probably more than enough to make up for distortions that add to earnings.
    [Wait a minute, pal. Whether taken as one-time expenses or amortized over several years, over time that's a wash - they show up one way or the other, while the fiddling with option prices goes on understating ongoing compensation charges year in and year out anyway. Conclusion? Corporate profit growth IS INDEED being wildly overstated and is yet another slef-delusional tool - aka plank in the coffin we are building for ourselves - to hype stock sales and our current historically unprecedented stock bubble. In other words, P/E ratios are even more inflated than they already look, because earnings aren't as high as they look.]

  4. [One big high-tech company is advertising a limited workweek (but does that mean a shorter workweek??) to attract job candidates - ]
    8/29 Solve complex problems for the biggest clients in the world and still have time for your life, Bos Globe, A21.
    ...Premier opportunities for System Engineers, Sales Education Specialists and Courseware Developers. See our ad in today's Professional Help Wanted Section.
    Lucent Technologies
    Bell Labs Innovations
    [Whether or not this implies a shorter workweek of 37.5 or 35 hours, at least it's a step away from the "blank check on your life" that a lot of companies want these days, especially startups.]
[At last, Greenspan links "inflation" & "stock market".]
8/28 Greenspan ties debate on rates to the market, by Louis Uchitelle, NYT, front page.
[Plus see 8/29 story above on Greenspan's final admission that stock options inflate corporate earnings.]
JACKSON HOLE, Wyo., Aug. 27 - Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, said today that the booming stock market now plays an increasingly significant role in the Fed's debate over inflation.... "We no longer have the luxury to look primarily to goods and services" when making decisions about interest rates, Mr. Greenspan said.... Controlling inflation remains the goal of interest rate changes, and that point was made repeatedly at the conference today..\..
 [But the Fed's mandate is to control both inflation and unemployment, yet it has completely abdicated its responsibility to control unemployment.
["But there is no unemployment," says you. Yes, there is, says we. Our eyes have changed so that we accept a much higher level as 'low' unemployment. During World War II, we regarded any unemployment over 2% as alarming. Now we callously congratulate ourselves when it hovers around twice that. And our official unemployment rate definition is not registering the increasing technological marginalization of the workforce. It needs to be redefined to include welfare, disability, homelessness, prisons, forced part-time and forced self-employment.]
...Mr. Greenspan signaled that rising stock prices, and to a lesser extent, rising real estate prices [go for it, Georgists!], must take their places alongside such traditional inflationary forces as tight labor markets, rising wages, shortages of goods and services that develop when demand outstrips supply, and the changing value of the dollar [ie: slow exports/trade deficit]. Despite the strong economic growth since 1996, inflation has remained unusually mild....
 [Not at all unusual for a pre-depression period such as the 1920s. But like most short-sighted analysts, Greenspan doesn't look that far back. Inflation is mild because these are periods of rapid technologification of the economy, unbalanced by reductions in the workweek. Result: the marginalization of the workforce. With diminishing leverage and rising job insecurity and economic anxiety, wage raises virtually cease and with them, wage-push inflation.]
The Fed, as a result, has been reluctant to push up interest rates very much - a reluctance that helps feed the stock market.
 [Our view - interest rate fiddling is superficial. It doesn't matter if wealth concentrates in stocks or treasuries, the problem is the strangulation of the consumer base occasioned by the concentration of wealth per se, regardless of its location.]
If a speculative bubble develops and the market finally crashes or declines sharply, the Fed's position is that it will step in then to minimize the damage by lowering rates and making money easier to borrow....
 [After the extreme risk-taking on the part of the IMF in Asia and the LTCM and other hedge funds, added to the distortedly high P/E ratios, especially in Internet stocks, why are we still talking about "if" a speculative bubble here? Because there's been no sustained crash or decline? So crashes and sharp declines per se don't count? And if the fear at the bottom of a crash or a sharp decline is depression, i.e., high unemployment, why doesn't the Fed focus on that all along? Why not prioritize that, as the initial, prime component of inflation, rather than ignoring it? We're saying that if the Fed is going to ignore one of its two mandated targets, it has picked the wrong one. If the Fed has to pick one target, that target should be unemployment, not inflation.]
Mr. Greenspan...said the Fed would intervene in financial markets only to correct sharp rises or falls in stock prices that might send shock waves through the rest of the economy.
 [But with such a superficial tool as interest rate manipulation, its power to correct such things is severely limited.]
The real issue, he said, is a credit squeeze - a sudden reluctance of lenders to lend - whether markets are rising or falling. "We don't respond to gradually rising or falling prices," he said. "We do respond to seizing up"..\..
 [Again, he thinks this is some kind of optional stubbornness on the part of lenders. It's not. It's structural. It's a corollary of the marginal utility of (the concentration of) wealth, the fact that, the more concentration, the less circulation. Right now Greenspan is kidding himself that the wealth in the stock markets is centrifuged rather than concentrated.]
The spectacular rise on Wall Street in recent years has added considerably to the wealth of millions of families....
 [This brings us back to the many statements about the thousands of new millionaires in the last ten years (see, for example, 5/03/2000 #1). But for every new millionaire, there are hundreds or thousands of new marginalized and pauperized workers. Eventually the consumer base is so hampered by downsizing, and the concentration of wealth occasioned by workers' lack of leverage in the job market so great, that a huge gap develops, paralleling the "income gap", between the astronomical funds available to invest and the smaller and smaller productivity locations cum investment targets that are supported by sustainable consumer markets....
[What we're saying to you, Alan, is that it's not a "seizing up" in the form of a "sudden reluctance of lenders" that you should be watching for, but a "seizing up" in the form of a concentration of wealth on scales that dwarf sustainably market-supported investment targets.] Having identified the booming stock market as a potentially inflationary force, Mr. Greenspan said that a lot more research needs to be done to determine why people are willing to make such risky investments and then, turning on a dime, flee them.
 [Alan baby, we're telling you that even their willingness is not that optional. It is conditioned by the incredible wealth that pours to the top brackets during a period of technological marginalization of the workforce, and the lack of alternatives that they have to store it in. Where are they going to put it? Give another billion to Bill Gates, and he barely has time to yell at an aide, "Throw it in a mutual fund and don't bother me!" The stock runup is self-fuelling when money is concentrating at these speeds and volumes. It's a Ponzi scheme that's hard-wired to the woodwork of our unwillingness to share, to part with our dreams of being rich = far wealthier than other people, not all wealthier together, though we're quick to try to paint that face on it when criticized.]
"If episodic recurrences of ruptured confidence are integral to the way our economy and our financial markets work now [OK we're with you] and in the future [just how long into the future do you suppose we're going to stay this stupid, Alan?], it has significant implications for risk management and, by implication, macroeconomic modeling and monetary policy.... It does not seem likely, however, even should all of the appropriate accounting adjustments to earnings be made...that such adjustments can be the central explanation of the extraordinary increase in stock prices in the past five years."
 [It isn't, Alan. The central explanation lies in the one topic that mainstream economists do not want to talk about, because it's "biting the hand that feeds" - the concentration of wealth due to the technological marginalization of the workforce in the context of a historically anomalous frozen workweek. The solution lies in the direction of a workweek that automatically adjusts to our technology levels, as mediated through our comprehensive unemployment rate - in a word, " timesizing."
[Greenspan's little glimpse of the obvious here opens up another route by which timesizing might come in. Driving up rates because stocks are too high could accelerate depression and make it obvious that we can no longer continue controlling inflation with a diet of fear, insecurity and anxiety for the workforce. The search for alternative controls is bound to quickly turn up the concept of a workweek-defined "reinvestment threshold" above which you may work only if you have considerable deflationary incentive, i.e., something other than the money motive, upon which today we are all-too-dependent....]

8/27  3 glimmers of hope -

  1. 3 top executives quit, one with some very interesting comments -

  2. Fed vote to raise rates in June opposed by one policy maker - FOMC member from Dallas was lone dissenter, by Jeanine Aversa, AP via Boston Globe, F2.
    WASHINGTON - The Federal Reserve's decision to raise interest rates for the first time in two years wasn't unanimous: One Fed policy maker dissented on the grounds that the move wasn't needed to keep inflation under control, according to minutes of the June 30 meeting released yesterday. Robert McTeer...was the sole opponent of the Fed's June 30 decision.... McTeer dissented "because he believed that tightening was unnecessary to contain inflation," the minutes said. "He noted that most measures of current inflation remain low and he saw few signs of inflation in the pipeline."...
    [Fiddling with interest rates is the only superficial tool we have today for achieving full employment, a goal we definitely have not achieved, despite "low" official unemployment rates (which are largely window dressing), while real wages are stagnant or slipping. Our Timesizing program hands interest rates gradually over to the public via regular referendums, and encourages a trend to lower them as much as possible and freeze them there, so we quit wasting our time with these superficial tools and get on with some structural changes that we should have started pursuing at the federal level 66 years ago - namely, linking the national maximum workweek to vary inversely (and slowly) with the unemployment rate, enforcing it universally right over "exempt" and "salary" loopholes, and redefining "unemployment" to include welfare, disability, homelessness, prisons, and also forced self-employment and forced part-time.
    [We at The Timesizing Wire are BORED with the same old problems going on and on and on - it's time to design a robust, long-term, dynamically self-adjusting solution and just DO IT!  Let's get this old world into the Third Millenium, instead of going on congratulating ourselves and shutting our eyes to the spreading problems.]

  3. Germany: army cutback, by Edmund Andrews, NYT, A6.
    The German Army will recruit 6,000 fewer soldiers next year than it had planned, as part of a much broader program by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to slash Government spending by nearly $20 billion. The total number of soldiers will remain roughly constant at 129,000, but plans for a military expansion will be dropped.
    [Das geht mit uns. (That's fine with us.) This is not exactly beating swords into ploughshares, but at least it's not making more swords.]
8/26 When work is not enough - Without training, success of welfare overhaul may falter - Unskilled workers make little headway over welfare benefits, by Michael Weinstein, NYT, frontpage, Business section.
[Basically we live in the dark age of "deus-ex-machina" capitalism, where Neanderthal CEOs decry government but push as many costs as they can off onto it, most critically, training costs.
[As the Third Millennium moves on, we'll slowly see the dawn of "Solution Right Here" Capitalism, where the private sector automatically does the massive ongoing reinvestment in human resources, most critically, pervasive, continuous training, retraining and cross-training. No more bullshit backbends to drag skilled workers from elsewhere. We'll make'em right here at home. Human versatility will replace seniority as the basic economic value.]

8/25  3 glimmers of hope today -

  1. Unpaid overtime earns date with law for Justice Dept., by David Johnston, NYT, front page.
    WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 - Workers for a large and well-known employer in the nation's capital have accused their bosses of juggling the books to cheat them out of overtime pay in violation of the law, and then lying about it to conceal the illegality. Sounds like a case for the Justice Department, except in this instance, the employer is the Justice Department, the agency charged with enforcing the law.... [A] lawsuit seeks a half-billion dollars for what [200] lawyers charge are millions of hours of overtime that the Department owes them....
    Internal...documents...show that Department officials...kept two sets of books. One set, on which paychecks were based, required lawyers to state that they worked 40 hours a week, no matter how much time they actually put in. Department officials also kept a second set of records - detailed, computerized time sheets that clocked overtime hours. The records were used by superiors to measure their lawyers' effort, to ask Congress for bigger budgets and even to bill legal fees to losing adversaries.
    ...[One lawyer] said, "These are individuals who have devoted their professional lives to enforcing the law, and, as a matter of principle, many object to the nation's chief law-enforcement agency purposefully ignoring the law."...
    [The eyes roll, the head shakes, the gorge rises....]

  2. Surge Components drops plan to buy Orbit Networks, Bloomberg via NYT, C3.
    ...saying Orbit could not meet the terms of their earlier agreement....
    [Hey, whatever it takes to chalk "up" another "down" for a downsizing set-up.]

  3. Gun sales banned on LA County property, Jeffrey Rabin, LA Times via Boston Globe, A3.
    ...a move aimed at driving the nation's largest gun show from the county fairgrounds. The decision on a 3-2 vote came two weeks to the day after a white supremacist allegedly fired a semiautomatic weapon into the North Valley... Community Center... wounding three children, a teenage camp counselor and a receptionist....
    Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky pressed for passage of the ordinance [which] bans the sale of guns and ammunition on all county property, including...the fairgrounds in Pomona...east of Los Angeles. "The biggest gun show in the United States is held right here in this county on land owned by the taxpayers of this county," he said. Yaroslavsky said some of the illegal automatic weapons possessed by the gunmen who engaged in a fierce firefight with police outside a bank in North Hollywood two years ago were traced back to the Pomona show.
    "Enough is enough," he said. "The time has come to put an end to all this."
     [Amen, amen, amen.]
8/24 Families would gain from a shorter workweek, letter to editor by Veronica Soell of Hamden, Conn., A18.
Hewlett-Packard has found that a flexible work policy has paid off in reducing attrition rates for both male and female management employees ("A push from the top shatters a glass ceiling," 8/22, A1). But does a typical full-time job really have to be 60 hours a week?
 [In 1900, the average workweek was 62 hours a week. We passed below 60 by 1905 at the latest. Now we're going backward, on 40-hour salaries! Re-inventing slavery by, for, and of ourselves. Boy, are we stupid.]
The workaholic life style of today's business managers can hardly be said to be family-friendly.... Our goal as a society should be a better balance of work and domestic responsibilities for both marriage partners. A 40-hour week would be a step in the right direction.
 [But believe it or not, that is our legal maximum workweek and has been since the 40-40-40 plan of 59 years ago - 40¢ an hour minimum wage, 40 hours per job maximum workweek, by 1940, per the Federal Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set the first national maximum at 44 hrs/wk in 1938 and graduated it down to 42 in 1939. There were no provisions for continued reduction. It should have been designed as an adjustable maximum and linked to a more broadly defined unemployment rate. But it stuck at 40 and with the spread of the "salary" loophole, has gradually become completely unenforced and ignored - except for the diminishing percentage of wage workers. This, during decades of unprecedented waves of labor-saving technology! We repeat, "Boy, are we stupid" - and pathetic.
[We go on and on about freedom and flee the most basic kind, free time. We go on and on about family values, and flee the best way to get them, family time. We go on and on about vanishing morality, and flee the best way to reverse that, more time for the community and the spiritual side of life.
[If technology has any point, it is to make life easier and better for everyone. By not designing an automatically unemployment-adjusted, and enforced, maximum workweek, we have guaranteed the deterioration of our quality of life both individually and as a society. America has planted the seed of its own destruction as technology continues to pour in and marginalize more and more employees. The proof is in our historically unprecedented prison population, and we'll have the world record next year when we surpass Russia. This is nothing but a petty failure to share, and not even an understandable failure to share the wealth, but an incomprehensible failure to share the work, albeit the vanishing work.
[But at least Veronica Soell of Hamden, Conn. is one American who has woken up. Are there any other Americans who aren't so pathetic that they wouldn't know what to do with more free time?]

8/24 Pooling ruling could dampen economy [by dampening mergers], by Ellen Ewing, Boston Globe, D4.
[Unless, of course, mergers dampen the economy....]
The New England business community has shown surprisingly little reaction to the recent decision buy the Financial Accounting Standards Board to eliminate pooling as a method of accounting for mergers and acquisitions.... For decades, the board has approved of two ways to account for a merger: "purchase" method and "pooling of interests" method. The purchase method assumes that one company is acquiring another.... Pooling has been considered the appropriate method of accounting for a merger of equals.... Pooling is rarely used in other countries.... Critics...argue that it can be abused..\.. It has become the accounting method of choice for high-tech mergers, regardless of comparative sizes of the participants.... The board plans on eliminating pooling in late 2000. Undoubtedly, this will have a chilling effect in the high-tech arena....
[Good!  High tech definitely needs to chill out.]

["More family time for family values"?]
8/22 Why the boss takes off - Some chief executives are finding out there's more to 'balance' in their lives than just accounting ledgers - Vance Brown, chief of GoldMine Software [Colorado Springs] enjoys some newfound family time with son Dylan, wife Nancy, and son Collin [foto caption], by Maggie Jackson, AP via Boston Globe, G4.
...Traditionally, those who make it to the top sacrifice everything - vacations, family lives, sometimes their health. Yet even as they cope with tremendous work pressures, a few chief executives are seeking better balance...often after tragedies.... Vance Brown, for example...slowed his work pace a few years ago after his marriage nearly failed. Today he's adamant about setting aside time for family and fun....
Katie Smith, chief executive of San Rafael, Calif.-based Mulberry Neckwear, took a lot of time off last fall to care for her elderly father and for a young son with cancer. Those dark days, she says, further underscored her commitment to having a family-friendly company.... Chief executives such as Smith realize that more employees are making work-life balance a priority.
To stem an exodus of talented women, the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche began radically changing its corporate culture, from one that valued hours in the office to one that prizes flexibility and efficiency. From the start, the company made changes from the top down, thanks largely to the foresight of J. Michael Cook, who retired as chief executive in May. Executives, for instance, learned to say they were having dinner at home or watching a school play, rather than saying they were "with a client."
...At the Birmingham, Ala., engineering and construction firm BE&K...chief executive Mike Goodrich...once...left a long-running client meeting to trick-or-treat with one of his children. "That says it all," [Donna] Sanborn [his employee relations manager] says. "It all starts at the top."...

8/21 Conservatism in decline?, by Caryl Rivers, Boston Globe, A15.
The New Deal officially ended when a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, announced, "The era of big government is over."
 [Oh no, it didn't, because that was preceded by a decade when a Republican president, Reagan, took government spending (albeit via the Pentagon) straight into the stratosphere and rocketed our national debt from the billions to the trillions.]
Are we...seeing the completion of another political cycle, the rise and fall of social conservatism? As a yound reporter in 1964 when the new conservative movement was born at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, I stared in amazement as supporters of Barry Goldwater booed Nelson Rockefeller, the embodiment of the Republican Eastern establishment.
 [But this didn't become serious until the GOP party bosses made their short-term smart, long-term suicidal decision at the 1980 convention to jump in bed with the religious right. Dumb, dumb, dumb.]
...Today conservative guru Paul Weyrich has declared that conservatives have lost the culture war and should get out of politics and retreat to the churches, where they have a stronghold.
 [Or, CREATE THEIR OWN PARTY so they quit ruining the two-party system for people who don't want to have to repeat the Separation of Church and State battle all over again. Under recent conditions in the GOP, no modern person had any choice but to vote Democratic [except when Phil Hyde ran against Joe Kennedy - and other isolated races.]
...Now Newt is gone and a moderate is poised to win the GOP presidential nomination.
 [But hopefully not the money-drowned candidate Caryl is thinking of.]
What happened? The answer is that social conservatives went from wooing to battering the prize they sought - the American people.
 [There's truth in this, but then, 100% absolutist religionists will always get to this point of blanket damnation of those outside their tiny band, and that is why we separated Church and State! Churches are not essentially tolerant. The ecclesia is "called out." "Come ye out from among them and be ye separate [and 100% pure]." There is a big monastic element in the Church, and that element rejects society as sinful. The seeds of the political age and the two-plus party system were sown when Anthony of Thebes hit the desert in 260 AD and started the split between priests and monks within the Christian movement. Priests hung in there in society and were tainted with society's sins. Some Christians periodically developed higher standards and had to move right out of society to try them out, as monks or nuns.]
For example:

Who would have imagined...in '92...that [seven years later] the front of the Republican pack [would be reached by someone chanting] "compassionate conservatism" [declaring] no litmus test for political appointees [and] bearing the stamp of old Eastern establishment Republicanism that was so roundly booed 35 years ago....
 [And close to the front of that pack, a woman, Elizabeth Dole. Isn't it time we "walked the walk" and put our votes where our self-trumpeted gender equality is? - like Britain, Norway, India, Ireland.... It is, after all, a new millennium.]

[Don't tell us Brazil is finally getting smart?!]
8/20 Brazil to turn down IMF installment - Signals of economic recovery are cited, by David Papadopoulos, Bloomberg via Boston Globe, C3.
[Well, maybe not. They're reacting more to the phony bellwether of investment flowing back into the country. Oh well, "hope springeth eternal."]

[What does China know that we don't know, or won't recognize?]
8/19 Fearing deflation, Chinese set limits on new factories, by Seth Faison, NYT, front page.
[Note that deflation was one of the really big features of the Great Depression of 1929-41.]
In a drastic move aimed at reversing a steady fall in prices, Chinese officials announced today that they would ban any new construction of factories that make a broad range of ordinary consumer items, from refrigerators and air-conditioners to candy, apple juice and liquor. The ban also covers the construction of luxury hotels, apartment and office buildings and department stores, which have also suffered sharp falls in prices for many months as the market has become glutted. In some Chinese cities, these buildings sit empty or barely used.
By withholding approval for any new production lines, while allwoing existing output to continue, officials apparently hope they can shackle China's deflation, a self-perpetuating spiral of falling prices and falling demand that has beome a serious new economic threat in Asia's biggest country, where growth has started to falter....
[This is the flipside of the big bandaid that America wound up applying during the Depression. FDR tried to stimulate phony demand. China is trying artificially to restrain supply. Neither works because neither goes to the root of the problem, which is the marginal utility of concentrated skills, work and wealth. How do you really fix it? Do what the US nearly did in 1933 when it passed a 30-hour workweek bill through the Senate (but then stupidly blocked it in the House) - CUT THE WORKWEEK and spread and share the vanishing work.
[When you relieve the surplus of manhours, each person gets more income and maintains spending. When you hype demand, as the US tried to do (& it only appeared to work because World War II came along to literally kill off the extra manhours) you stop deflation but create dependency and inflation. When you restrain supply, as China is trying to do, you stop deflation but create poverty and starvation.
[The only way out of this is the way we snubbed in 1933, thinking it was socialism (though we wound up with a lot more socialism than this one regulation would have brought) - CUT THE WORKWEEK. The only thing we need to nationalize at this point in economic evolution is the workweek. Share the vanishing work, by spreading it around to everyone, by cutting the workweek. It's called Timesizing.]

[Firm joins push into after-hours trading - trend forces clearer distinction between business hours and shifts, between "per-job" and "per-person" (as in "expand business hours and per-job time indefinitely" but "balance and limit shifts and SHARE per-person worktime".]
8/18/99 E*Trade joins push to extend trading hours, by David Barboza, NYT, C1.
...The big on-line brokerage firm, and Instinet, a stock trading network that serves institutional investors, said yesterday that they would team up to offer small investors the opportunity to trade stocks after the major exchanges close for the day.... Until now, after-hours stock trading has been monopolized by institutional investors and Wall Street brokerage firms buying and selling stocks on late-breaking news or early-morning tips....
[More importantly, the trend toward round-the-clock, seven-day-a-week business will force Type A-personality (60,70,80-hours/week on salary) employees to admit their limits or sicken&die, thus opening the way for real progress in enforcing a maximum workweek and reducing it - so that the vanishing work & earnings can be shared by all. We call it BurmaShave, oops, Timesizing.]

[Buckminster Fuller's dream of cheap, lightweight, battery substitutes comes closer.]
8/17 Energy to count on - Fuel cells tapped as power source for computer systems, by Matthew Wald, NYT, C1.
...When power flickered briefly at the HQ of the First National Bank of Omaha [it caused] a computer crash that executives vowed would never happen again.... The bank's solution is attracting attention... it uses fuel cells, a technology that shows promise for reliability, flexibility and cleanliness. So far, fuel cell technology has failed to catch on because of high costs, but in an era of increasing dependence on voltage-sensitive computer equipment, people will pay a lot for power that will not quit. So after seven years of failing to attract widespread commercial use, fuel cells may now have found a niche.
First National bought them when it decided that the 99.9% reliability of its old system was not good enough. That system had batteries powering the computers until the emergency generators could kick in. But when the Omaha Public Power District faltered one cold day in 1997, the bank hit that 1% moment: the batteries quit too. Engineers found later that two in a string of several dozen batteries had quietly failed, probably months before....
The article goes on to point out that fuel cells are 99.99997% reliable, compared to only 99.9% of traditional batteries. They are 40% efficient, compared to only 30% of traditional power plants. They are considerably more expensive to install than traditional power plants but, and this is a big 'but,' they are 25% less expensive to operate - so they will pay back extra installation costs quickly.]

8/16/99 AG to appeal two mergers of utilities - Reilly cites cost to consumers, by Peter Howe, Boston Globe, front page.
[We never thought we'd be praising Tom Reilly after his do-nothing response to voter fraud in Somerville, but in this case, he's battling Massachusetts' do-nothing governor on behalf of consumers.]
State Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly today will formally appeal the approval of two electric and gas utility mergers totaling nearly $5 billion and affecting 2 million Eastern Massachusetts customers, contending Gov. Paul Celucci's administration betrayed consumers' interests in backing the deals.
Under a procedure last used in 1984...Reilly will challenge the state Dept. of Telecommunications and Energy's approval of new rate plans supporting the Boston Edison-Commonwealth Energy merger and the acquisition of Colonial Gas by the parent company of Boston Gas.
In both cases, utility regulators appointed by Celucci have [allowed] the utlities to charge customers for hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of "acquisition premiums' being paid to shareholders and investment bankers....
[What an outrage. We suspected Celucci was a zero. We didn't know he'd turn out to be an accessory to robbery as well. More power to Tom Reilly on this one! If he keeps this kind of thing up, we might even vote for him next time.]
Note also on 8/26/99: Utility merger finalized [- Parent companies of Boston Edison & Commonwealth Energy completed their merger into new company called NStar], by Peter Howe, Bos Globe, D9.
...Separately, AG Thomas F. Reilly as expected filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Judicial Court challenging state regulators' approval of Nstar's plans to recoup nearly $1 billion in merger costs from customers' bills over the next 40 years, a sum utility officials contend will be offset by $3.5 billion in savings. Reilly does not oppose the merger, only the method of recouping merger costs....

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