Respect Authority

My defenses are down. On an impromptu outlet shopping adventure this week, I found myself considering all manner of unnecessary purchases, things I couldn’t even begin to claim I “need” - sneakers, jeans, jewelry, wholesale quantities of chocolate truffles. Surrounded by a triple threat of pricing markdowns - outlet, recession, Christmas - I was unprepared to bring forth the will power necessary to just say no. To half-price Nikes, to $20 Chuck Taylors, even - in a moment of sheer nostalgia - to $15 Pacific Sunwear jeans.

If this is shopping now, when the recession is little more than a buzzword for middle America, and “depression” still associated with 1929, bread lines and our grandparents’ complaining, I find myself increasingly concerned that next year, and the unavoidable economic melee sure to come with it, will yield another flurry of discount shopping - one which I might find myself even less capable of evading. Read More ›

While Great Depression II is putting the kibosh on a lot of things I’d rather see stick around (office holiday parties, extravagant Christmases, financial security), there are more than a few things I’m perfectly okay with letting go in the name of economic savvy – and Philadelphia’s annual Mummers Parade is absolutely 100% one of them. Unfortunately for me, and anyone whose mother has ever made them sit through this circus of inanity, the Philadelphia Mummers Association just inked a deal to keep the New Year’s Day parade in tact. Joy. Read More ›

Why are newspapers and magazines having such trouble visually depicting the new economic crisis? Is it because there are no bread lines? No “Free Soup” signs? A lack of fedoras? Every newspaper in the country has run a front page story about the crashing American economy and the accompanying photograph is always a huge failure. If I see one more lonely ATM machine, one more “going out of business sale” sign, or (god forbid) another beleaguered looking stockbroker, I may lose it. Granted, I have no idea what I would do if a photo editor told me to go out and shoot the completely non-visual market crash, but really guys? This is the best you can come up with?

After a few weeks of this, I was needless to say pleased when the Magnum photo agency announced they would be documenting “The New Depression” as it was being called. Magnum is the true old boys club of documentary photography so if anyone could do it, it would be someone working for them. The first assignment went to internationally acclaimed photographer Paolo Pellegrin, one of my all time favorites (his book, Telex Iran, is one of the greatest accounts of civil uprising ever published), and this is what he came up with. Empty cobblestone roads around Wall Street, large financial buildings split by shadows, and motherfucking pictures of sad traders on market floors.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking for the next migrant mother, but variety is, after all, the spice of life, and frankly, I’m not seeing a whole lot of it.

"I can derelict my own balls."

Ever feel the Earth heave under you? Yeah? Was it when you were reading recent financial news instead of doing something productive? Me too.

Stag-deflation people. Read that word again because its gonna mean something for you very soon. Apparently some crazy guy has been popping out articles since mid-summer about some sort of doomsday scenario in which the economy waddles about while the price of things steadily declines.

Have no idea why that matters? Me neither. But for what it’s worth, we’ve been living with its evil twin - stagflation, the art of increasing the cost of living while plateauing wages - since 1965. Although that sounds like a shitty situation, the “problem” has already been addressed. By using credit cards in order to live paycheck to paycheck, plus floating your cell phone bill, you’re able to free up your one-time bonus in order to put a down payment on a house that gets you the equity loan you need to pay your cable bill.

So how can the price of goods going down with a economy expanding at about the same rate as an ingrown nail hurt you and me?

As far as I can decipher, stagdeflation is a vicious global cycle that decreases confidence, decreasing demand, which decreases value, then production, and finally the labor that produces the worthless shit that no one wants to buy anymore. Basically if no one wants to buy things with money they can’t get, they lose their jobs producing shit to sell to other people who feel the same way. All the while the only sector of the job market that’s actually growing is Arianna Huffington’s unpaid corp of meltdown bloggers. Long story short: Great Depression II. Read More ›

As you should well know by now, ‘Merica lost 533,000 jobs in the month of November, bringing the Recession Job Loss Grand Total to more than two million - and rendering Barack Obama’s plan to create 2.5 million jobs in two years insufficient before the man even takes office. Hooray!

But just in case this all continues to seem just a tad too abstract to take in - after all, shit, I’m still employed so who cares? - let’s take a look at the meaning of the number 500,000.

• Number of iPhones estimated to have sold on the phone’s debut weekend in 2007.
• Amount of money IKEA North America agreed to pay in civil penalties for failing to immediately report “incidents about defective outdoor candles.”
• Decline in the number of company cars on Britain’s roads since 1999.
• Amount federal auditors say Al Sharpton’s 2004 campaign owes the government for illegal donations and other financial improprieties.
• The indigenous population of Australia.

In other words, that’s a lot o’ jobs, and a lot o’ problems that are gonna need fixing right off the bat. Seriously economy, we get it. You’re hurting, you’re probably going to get worse before you get better, and frankly you’re getting just a little needy.

I have an awkward question: does President-elect Obama have enough economic insight and instinct to lead us (as a people, of course) away from complete financial ruin?

For the past two days, Obama and his rag-tag team of second-hand economic advisors have outlined their hopes and dreams for the economy.  But what’s conspicuously absent is any address of the underlying crisis behind our budding Great Depression II.

Obama’s adorable insistence that the bailout isn’t working because of its “Main Street” negligence is naive. Yes, Americans are suffering but it isn’t because Paulson is throwing money into Wall Street’s black hole as opposed to the black holes in our wallets. The economy is tanking because we’re running out of bubbles to prop it up with.

In the 20s we had an inventory bubble, in the 80s we had a dollar-backed security bubble, in the 90s we had a fucking pets.com bubble, two years ago we had the housing bubble and now we have the CDS bubble - the final and most absurd bubble in our series of economic downturns.
Read More ›

Zero Tolerance is a weekly feature, appearing on Saturdays, that briefly covers some unacceptable offense from the prior week. This is far from a hard science, in fact, it’s entirely likely that it’s not even fact based — indeed, this is pure opinionated ranting because it’s my website and I can cry if I want to. — RA

In the age of the Internet, print magazines’ place in the world is deteriorating rapidly. Every week another once-heralded publication trims its pages, reduces frequency, or in the hopelessly ironic case of PC Magazine this week, goes all-online. It won’t be too long before picking up the latest issue of Time or People simply means checking your e-mail.

Since RA is already a blog, we can’t explore the all-online option anymore than we already have, yet in the actual trickle-down effect of nationwide economics, our staff is just as beaten down as the underpaid and ever-laid-off employees of print magazines. After all, we have other jobs, and can only go so long before questioning how much time and energy to put into this little effort (once called masturbatory by a reader, who we’ve since killed) at the expense of things like social interaction, or excessive drinking. Seriously, I haven’t done any excessive drinking in hours because of this blog! It’s killing me. Read More ›

Watch out George W., there’s a new decider in town. 

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said Wednesday that the U.S. government would no longer be buying out beleaguered banks’ troubled assets as part of its $700 billion bailout, effectively destroying the bailout’s initial purpose, as well as the reason Congress gave it the go-ahead in the first place. What’s that you say? How can he do that? Well, like any smart moneyman, Paulson made sure to give himself absolute power on the bailout’s fund allocation. This essentially means that if you have a problem with the way he chooses to pass out his dolla’ dolla’ bills, you can pretty much go fuck yourself.

So why the switcheroo? In a press conference, Paulson said the initial plan would have taken too much time, and that it makes more sense for the Treasury to buy stakes in distressed banks and leave it up to them to do the lending. In other words, he’s impatient and nationalizing the country’s financial institutions will make it easier to go Communist down the line. 

I find this rather ironic considering every political and financial official out there has chided the American public — investors especially — for being impatient when it comes to the bailout’s effects. I thought we were supposed to be satisfied twiddling our thumbs while things were tumbling down around us?

I certainly hope so, since over the last few months I’ve become a fairly masterful thumb-twiddler and I’d hate to see my newfound talent go to waste just because the economy decided to go and get itself fixed in an effective and timely manner.

Remember the days when gas was a mere $2 per gallon? Of course you do, because those days are right now!

Seriously, while everyone was concerning themselves with multi-billion-dollar bailouts and this whole “Woe is me, I can’t pay my bills and my kids are sick and I’m getting evicted,” nonsense, gas is selling for under $2 a gallon in New Jersey. If I’m not mistaken, doesn’t this mean all our problems are over? Didn’t this whole thing start with people who couldn’t fork over the $50 it cost to fill up their SUVs? Weren’t people complaining about gas prices long before home prices, or food prices, or $700-billion-bailout prices? Shouldn’t we all be dancing in the streets while our cars idle in flamboyant celebration of the fact that we can afford to visit our out-of-state relatives again? Make sure the retirement community pool is heated Nana, because Florida here I come!

Alas, no. These days we’d give up our first born children for the chance to bitch about gas prices, that is if bitching about gas prices meant it was 2007 and the world hadn’t gone to shit yet. Shelling out two twenties to get through ten commutes is nothing when you’ve watched your 401(k) shell out $2,000 in three months.

So listen God, I know we spent months praying for discounts at the pump, clutching our Shell Cards between our folded hands like rosary beads, but it would be great if you could go ahead and forget all that. We have bigger fish to fry now, like paying off that car we’ve been filling with $1.99/gallon unleaded.

I love Newsday. The Federal Reserve is poised to cut interest rates again, to a shameful 1%, one day after the Dow surged 900 points and New York Gov. David Paterson bought knee pads in preparation for begging some cash off the federal government. We’re about to have one of the most important presidential elections in our lifetime, and we’re still at war in Iraq. But why bother with all that when you can document the history of neckbeards?!

"I'm smoking pot in a business suit!"

Andrew Lahde, of Lahde Capital Management, quit his job on Friday after making “enough of [his] own wealth to manage”.

That’s cute, he’s made his piece and now wants to retire, no wait… RANT ABOUT THE STATE OF SOCIETY.

Andrew admits that he was only in the “game” for “money”. He also attributes his ease in getting paid to the ol’ boy network that got Bush in the White House and, apparently, top executives of the biggest failed banks undeservedly through expensive and prestigious schools then, finally, into our wallets - Kira’s 401(k).

But if you think he’d be content with gloating in the faces of shamed members of the “aristocracy” that were “stupid enough to take the other side of [Andrew's] trades”, you’d be wrong.  Andrew’s got another plan for America and it’s legalizing weed!

Ah, the female. The evil female plant — marijuana. It gets you high, it makes you laugh, it does not produce a hangover. Unlike alcohol, it does not result in bar fights or wife beating. So, why is this innocuous plant illegal? Is it a gateway drug? No, that would be alcohol, which is so heavily advertised in this country. My only conclusion as to why it is illegal, is that Corporate America, which owns Congress, would rather sell you Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax and other additive [sic] drugs, than allow you to grow a plant in your home without some of the profits going into their coffers. This policy is ludicrous.

Okay Andrew, I’ve figured you out. You wrote this swan song completely high. It’s one thing to smoke when you get home, but to write your resignation letter and distribute it to your clients and co-workers while completely stoned is whole ‘nother level of potheadedness/something I would do. All the indicators are there: dramatic and excessive historical references, slightly paranoid tone and a general drift toward conspiracy. 

We know the signs well, Andrew Lahde, and I will be emailing you later for some “networking” on behalf of myself and the rest of the Respect Authority staff.

[Financial Times]

Whoever laid out the LA Times on Tuesday is either from the future and trying to tell us something, has a great sense of juxtaposition, or does not have a job anymore.

…Or maybe they just really love Independence Day.