Clock is ticking

Paul Krugman offered up a column this morning in the NYTimes regarding the slow collapse of American education. Part of it is due of course to the transition of traditional education to more or less trade school education with a heavy emphasis on intense learing and mastering of vertical skill sets - programming, business niches, etc. rather than the broader liberal arts we got when in those ancient times, we went to University.

More troubling is his observation that the less fortunate among us are saddled with woes from this prolonged economic downturn and the university experience, even the community college possibility are foresaken because people can't afford it and these institutions are cutting back.

My point with the clock is that time slips by.  The chances for attendance at a later date just doesn't happen as it is well known that when students leave the lockstep of high school to college, they don't come back later in life to any great degree  unless it is job specific learning.

That is going to cause a gap if prolonged.  Where there has been a steady stream of graduates diverse enough to fuel the need, there is going to be fewer to choose from and a high school education, while once robust, really isn't so hot anymore and these folks are often consigned to working up the hard way if at all.

You may not like what we do in education in this country and there is plenty of oafishness in the system, the fact is that our system is the envy of the world and we probably ought to think about it more.

Your turn

I'm all ears today including a budding ear ache from a sore throat.  ....   So I'm turning this over to you.

What do you want to read? What areas? As this is a blog written in the midst of a very busy trading floor that is knee deep (I avoided up to it's ears) in all things financial, I've stayed away from such subjects pretty much as we all need a little diversity.  So what diversity do you like, if any, and what would areas would you like topics on? 

Sweets to the sweet. New Ads on CNBC and other places

Talk about coincidences.  I watched Rachel Madow last night and she had on some strange person named Berman who has a rash of pseudo-science websites up of which sweetscam.com is one of them.

(sweet and) LOW and behold starting about 5am today on CNBC and MSNBC (and of course our buddies at Faux News) there is a commercial that is part of an ad campaign out saying all sugar is the same yada yada and it directs to sweetscam.com mentioned above.

The science is still "out" on a lot of what they claim and their logic is tortured to say the least.  Corn syrup is used on most soft drinks and one point they make is corn syrup gets a bad rap due to the fattyfat kids drinking too much soda products and gosh its not the syrup that is causing it...

I'm not impressed. I'm not sure the point they are making.  Frankly I don't get where they are going with this or the myriad other sites they run of the same ilk.  I would like to know who is forking over ten grand a spot on CNBC and running this whole thing.

Least impressive is the science presented.  The expert is a Dartmouth music major who according to Berman is really smart.  I don't discount music majors being really smart but that is a long way from a ph.d. and lab experience in molecular science.  Again. I'm not impressed. Read it for youself and look at the blog listings on their main page.  Others seem to agree with me.

How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect

As kids we played a picture puzzle that you will all remember...the "can you find the hockey stick in this picture". That was fairly easy in that the image (the hockey stick) really was there and simply in the midst of a number of other recognizable objects. The observations posed in the NYTimes piece linked in the title explore this a bit and it is a good read. I'll let you read it or encourage you to do so.

In advertising there is a theory about white space in an ad. The simple truth is that eye/mind doesn’t focus on white spaces and move toward the first identifiable recognizable product. Simply it is somehow reassuring to find something that one can relate to in some way and the brain goes through all sorts of gyrations until it solves the problem or, in an advertising scene, arrives at the message.

As I sit with traders all day long I see this often. Seemingly unrelated materials and events that are really a pattern of sorts fill their screens and therefore mind. A lot of very smart people sitting around trying to find out what is what with what we now know to be their brains lighting up.

If you are intrigued by this you should be a trader...but then you should be a trader anyway.

A stroll down retirement lane

I read a very interesting article in the New Yorker several years back.  The idea of the article was in betting which emerging economy was best positioned population-wise to grow significantly and optimally.Everyone reads this stuff a little differently and as with any well written article, stuff which isn’t apparent to you at the time wanders around in brains and comes back out in a more provocative form. 

The gist of the article was that certain countries have a real advantage based on working population versus “supported” population. The verso side of the folio is that countries with a high number of pensioners in comparison have a really ugly set of circumstances.

An example was given about a major steel company who, in the 1950s was the big dog on the block. A couple things happened to it. Over time their workforce aged and instead of 10+ workers supporting the pension of 1 retiree, the ratio slowly closed. Not horrible but also not sustainable. You need a number of workers to support one pension and when it gets to 1:1, it is a catastrophe for profitability as every spare cent of cash goes to fund a system that gets more out of whack each day.

Compounding this was management’s realization that technology could add efficiency thus lowering product cost and also signaling a reduction in the work force (machines replacing jobs) – a double whammy. Summary: fewer workers supporting more retirees, and, more manufacturing efficiency to lower product costs results in the need for fewer workers…the problem compounds.

The steel company fairly bled money and went belly up. Then, an amazing thing happened. The company reformed into a highly automated workplace and when it hired again the ratio of wage earners/funders v. the retirees was again reduced to favorable numbers and the company was profitable.

The article’s point was that some countries have good ratios and a future not clouded by the pension issue. Countries with the reverse are in for some tough sledding.

Now out there sits a fairly sizeable pool of older folk facing a health care train wreck out there waiting for the tracks to clear. The simple truth is that there may not be enough payers to satisfy the needs of the non-earners.

This is a fine pickle. Ratios that are out of sync do not do well. Just letting you folks living on retirement lane that some stuff may be floating your way.

What nice folks...our friends from Florida Atlantic

We had a little event last night for some students from Florida Atlanta University who had some levels of interest in trading and learning how.  Things like this are, interestingly enough, more education for us sometimes than for them.

I'm old school. I went to college before SAT preps and all that nonsense where you got by because you could navigate the dewey decimal system and new how to to decorate your library carrel (now selling as antiques).  The art of verbal communication was paramount as what passed as a word processor was an IBM Selectric II (3 pages at a time in memory) and there was NO internet. None. We communicated thoughtfully and respected research based knowledge. I've been therefore somewhat scornful of the recent college crops with the grade inflation, the casual view of history and ignorance of just plain things...music, literature, philosophy...the liberal arts in general. I've found them to be, snobbishly I'll admit, boring conversationalists.

So back to last night.  Up turns a dozen or so early 20 somethings who were interesting on a number of levels.  They were courteous and curious, smart on any number of levels and very verbal. They spoke well. They thought about what they were saying.  Their questions were well framed and probing.  Above all they were very very nice people and a pleasure to be around.

Of course we hope that some choose to pursue further prospects with us and we would gain a lot by having them among us.  Not to be too maudlin, but I would feel comfortable having them around and perchance to be friends with them.

As you can see I got more out of this than I bargained for and feel better for the experience.  These are bright people and FAU should be and I am sure is proud to have them as future alumni.

Jobs and the infamous "non-farm" payroll figure

Try looking it up...

When the employment figures come out the report always says  "non-farm payroll". As I said try to easily get that figure - that qualifier - and figuring why it is phrased that way.  I have a theory based on what I have read but it is probably wrong.

Just an observation and obviously my own as a private citizen and not as part of Prism..be clear on that...but the stats on this blog show that a lot of non-financial-trader types read this so here goes:

1.  It is a way to keep data constant...if we have always done it that way and we change in any way then historical data becomes irrelevant. 

2.  With that "qualifier" the non-farm could be read as "urban" where there are no farms (I've actually checked - there aren't a lot of farms in NYC) and this, to a minor degree slants things.

3.  There really aren't a lot of farms anymore. If you take the link in the title (the title is actually a link by the way)  but here it is anyway http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/ag101/demographics.html it is pretty interesting as real-deal farming numbers are pretty small and the "gentlemen farm" and a lot of others are just family operations that don't hire a lot of people.  Point is, the "farm payroll"  unemployment although probably highly seasonal and populated by a lot of low wage workers is pretty small. When I write "pretty" in anything I think of Larry David and Curb Your Entusiasm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_05qJTeNNI.

So there are probably a lot of good reasons to say "non-farm payroll" but it doesn't sinc up with the 6.8 million farms in operation 50+ years ago and the million or so farms currently - many of the very small -well I'm just not sure that this jobless stat isn't just a blip.