These are the men and women Barack Obama assembled today to advise him on how best to fix the cratering economy. They are a largely respected group, and though they ain't perfect—so many CEOs and so much Larry "Women Be Unable to Learn Math" Summers!—they are certainly more reassuring than the ideologues and incompetents our last guy surrounded himself with. We've identified them for your benefit and their brief bios are below.
OBAMA FIRST PRESS CONFERENCE RUNNING TEN TO FIFTEEN MINUTES LATE! That's not change we can believe in! "Before the election, he was always on time," CNN reports. Now they're playing Rush Limbaugh complaining about Rahm Emanuel on one side of the screen and an empty podium on the other. We'll update with details and eventually video! 2:41 Oh, Robert Byrd is stepping down as Chairman of the Appropriations Committee. Byrd, the former KKK member, is delighted with new President Obama! What a country! Still an empty podium. 2:43 Oh, god, FIVE MORE MINUTES. Obama is breaking promises all over the place, today. We are ashamed. HILLARY IN 2012! 2:48 Another five minutes! Jesus, what is going on in this economic meeting?? Is he just shouting obscenities about the hideous mess he's just inherited? Are they getting high? Is Larry Summers complaining about uppity womens again? 2:50 Here come the economic superfriends. Robert Reich is hilarious, is it mean to laugh at how funny he looks? Yes, it probably is. But he's not technically a little person, just a regular short person, so it's ok. Now Obama is backstage putting out his cigarette, maybe? 2:53 Rahm Emanuel is another tiny person, isn't he? What's up with that? The tiny cabinet! Trend piece! OH WAIT HERE'S OBAMA. 2:54 God, President Obama, we know things suck, everywhere. "The United States has only one government and one president, at a time" — GOD DAMMIT, NOW HE TELLS US. Right now, President-elect, we don't have any presidents. Bush checked out a year ago! But once Barry is sworn in, he'll help all the hardworking families. Middle class rescue plan! Extend unemployment and a new stimulus plan. Small businesses, blah. Economic policy is boooring. Announce a WPA Federal Bloggers Project, Obama. Do it. Come on. 2:55 Oh, the Auto Industry, they can go to hell. Obama should announce we need a new generation of fuel-efficient FLYING CARS. Then we'd bail them out. We're avoiding the foreclosures. Monitoring challenges. Strengthening the middle class. 2:58 Barack Obama looks exhausted. He does not underestimate the enormity of the task that lies ahead. 2:59 Question time! Does he have a coherent stimulus/rescue plan? Surely he does! Why must it be explained in such vague terms, President Hopey? 3:00 Can we get things done in a lame duck session? No, we can't. So we wait for his new session. 3:01 President Achmadinejad sent a note of congratulations! When do we send all the envoys to the evil countries? Campaign boilerplate about Iran. "It's only been three days since the election," says the President of Disappointing us. Why isn't everything different? 3:02 Only one president at a time! "I am not the president." 3:03 Will it rattle the markets when President Bush does some of his famous DECIDING? Guys, President Bush has done no deciding since 2006. Obama will have dinner with him, later, and they'll get along fine, and everyone will recognize the severity of every situation. Man we all know they're just going to talk about football, the whole time. 3:05 In terms of picking his cabinet, Barack Obama has a weird, foreign, elitist idea about "thinking things through" and deliberating before making decisions? 3:06 Who will Obama select for his Senate seat? He defers to the Governor, though of course it will be Jesse Jackson Jr (shhhh!). 3:07 Lynn Sweet! We love her! She has an arm in a sling! She hurt her shoulder running to his speech on election night! Obama says that was the only major incident! She asks about talking to former presidents. Obama has spoken to ALL OF THEM. Hah, he made a Nancy Reagan seance joke. Obama is rereading Lincoln, so basically it's New Civil War Time, guys. "With respect to the dog: This is a major issue." This is hilarious. Malia is allergic, so it has to be hypoallergenic. But they want a shelter dog! "Obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts, like me." This is a pressing issue in the Obama household. Awesome. 3:09 Are the president's intelligence briefings scaring the shit out of Barry? They don't seem to be! 3:11 We're gonna soak the rich. Good night everybody!
At 2:30 today, President-elect Barack Obama will hold his first press conference since the election. Reporters will ask him for his magical plan to fix the miserable economy and Obama will announce that out-of-work Americans will be relocated to state-run Unicorn Ranches, or something, and the markets will rally, hooray. But he'll make no personnel announcements! Those wondering who might end up on his presidential money team could look at his current advisors, of course. Obama's assembled a 17-member all-star team of economic advisors, from Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin, who helped create the current crisis under the Clinton administration (Republican talking points yay!!) to the chairman of Google and Warren Buffet, America's two last remaining rich people. Obama's been totally cold to the press for the entirety of the campaign, and reporters don't actually like him very much, so it might be interesting. Obama to meet economic advisors after grim jobs data [Reuters]
Earlier today, we were sent a link to Change.gov, the amusingly named official government website of President-elect Obama's transition team. The site is a wholesale transfer of Obama's Apple-inspired fancy millennial Brand to an official White House website, which is still jarring and a bit, uh, hard to believe. The site links to Obama's acceptance speech, a blog, and, tantalizingly, jobs. Obama administration jobs!! Everyone in America needs jobs, right now, so of course now Change.gov has crashed, and it returns only an error message when you try to visit. Breaking promises already, Senator Hopey! Click for the screenshot of the New America that was too good to be true, while you endlessly refresh the page and fine-tune your resume.
It's the story we never get tired of hearing, and today the Los Angeles Times has it. The wives of Wall Street executives are having to scale back spending in the wake of poor economic times, and their mild suffering can become our immoral enjoyment as the previously pampered significant others have to tell their children, "Daddy can't buy you a Sea Doo watercraft this year."Housewife Fran Alvarez' husband was making $250,000 per annum writing software for Credit Suisse. Now things have taken a turn for terrible:
It's always fun to get slammed by a disaster and then to look back and discover that some people had been warning you about it forever. Well, The Economist has been publishing scary covers warning of DOOM for years, and they are compiled in a nifty slide show here. We've put together a tasty little sampler after the jump.
There's nothing like a truly excellent goodbye letter. One case in point is a rambling missive to the world from former hedge fund manager Andrew Lahde, who closed shop last month after deciding that it was just too risky to keep doing business with banks. Specifically, he calls out the, "low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America."
With money scarce, locals and tourists alike have stopped tossing their spare change and loose dollars to New York City's famed street performers. When every last penny has to be preserved for booze, tranqs, and anti-anxiety drugs, people are simply not splurging on curbside entertainment like they used to. Even that silver statue/robot dude from Times Square and the South Street Seaport is feeling the pinch. The performer, who calls himself Orange Mime, testifies, "The economy has definitely affected my earnings as a street performer. I am a living statue (silver/gold robot guy) and I have noticed a significant loss in recent weeks... I only hope it gets better for December because that is usually my best month."
Although the business media can't sell any ads during an economic meltdown like the one we're having now, it sure is a great chance for reporters to make names for themselves. Business reporters absolutely live for the periodic destruction of the American economy. This is their Normandy! After the jump, we survey the media landscape and pick out the winners and losers—all your favorites, from Paul Krugman to Jim Cramer, ranked on a merciless 10-point scale! [Ratings are on a 1-10 scale—with 10 being the best—and are based on how much the media person or outlet has benefited from the crisis, how right they've been, and how much influence they've had.] WINNERS
Man, Halloween is going to suck this year. A hollow-eyed populace, hobbled by the Wall Street meltdown and unable to afford real costumes, will just wander the streets aimlessly, their kids draped in old bedsheets or festooned with cardboard cutouts in the rough shape of a pirate hat, begging their poverty-stricken neighbors for a boiled egg or a pinch of precious table sugar. Even the corporate bloodsuckers—who normally use Halloween as a marketing opportunity, to drain every last cent out of us in order to blow it on worthless Candy Corn futures—can see what's happening. The only monster this year is ourselves:
While some shell-shocked banking douches are selling blow-jobs as a way to cope with the economic meltdown, others are turning to more pedestrian methods to ease their stress. Namely, they're smoking their lungs out. Now that their hopes and dreams are dead, there's not much point to looking after their health, and they can be found puffing away all over the financial district like metalheads behind the high school bleachers. "Before the turmoil, says [Erick] Giliberti, a manager at Deloitte who works with mortgage-backed securities, I was maybe a pack a week.' Now? 'Probably double that...I can't stare at my computer screen anymore and watch the market collapse in front of me—I just want to get away from it.'"
The $700 billion bailout that leaders of Congress ran out in the middle of the night to shout about, maybe isn't happening after all. Dealbreaker reports that Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich is now telling the press that the bailout plan just doesn't have the votes to get through Congress. "I will tell you right now I don't know if they have votes...If the votes were there, this would be on the floor [...] None of this has been subject to a critical analysis. We haven't had access to the books to the people who are claiming they are going broke. They rushed this Congress into the Iraq resolution and look what happened. Catastrophe for this nation as well as for the people of Iraq." After the jump, video of Kucinich blowing his lid over the proposal on the House floor this afternoon.
Click to viewBoomp3.com Thirsty Tuesday hit an unfortunate sour note for one fan of the popular HBO series Entourage when its star Adrian Grenier entered the bar. The fan attempted to confront Grenier about the program's declining quality but soon fled tearfully, leaving only boyfriend left in the bar. The boyfriend gave Grenier the Cliff Notes version of the situation, explaining how despondent she’s been since Entourage's slide. Never one to disappoint a fan, Grenier flew out of the bar, rushed down the street, caught up with the sobbing woman and gave her a big hug. He then clutched her tightly, leaning in to whisper something in her ear. The tears quickly faded into a smile and a look of optimism. Grenier and the woman left their embrace and started to walk back to the bar. “Also," Grenier added, "the economy is going to bounce back. It always does.” [Photo Credit: INF Daily] *A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.
NEW YORK — And then there were none. Did you read that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are turning into boring old moneylenders, leaving Wall Street without any investment banks? Few in the Valley will weep; the investment banks abandoned tech long ago. The handful of investment bankers left in San Francisco and Palo Alto handle private placements and wealth management. IPOs? Are you kidding? Even the M&A deals going on are too small to attract New York's attention. The main worry on the left-behind coast is that Wall Street will drag the economy down, and take tech spending with it. Not that anyone is admitting it.A San Francisco Chronicle reporter attempting to survey the landscape had no luck getting called back:
Not to use that hacky old line about saving all their asses in WWII and leaving them free to invest in things other than standing armies for the last 60-plus years, but Europe is just laughing its delicate ass off at us now that we're in financial trouble. The little bastards. "They list greed and Greenspan among the culprits, and there are comparisons to . . . Albania. But amid the gloating, there is fear for financial systems in Britain, Spain, Italy and elsewhere. It's a rare day when finance officials, leftist intellectuals and ordinary salespeople can agree on something. But the economic meltdown that wrought its wrath from Rome to Madrid to Berlin this week brought Europeans together in a harsh chorus of condemnation of the excess and disarray on Wall Street. The finance minister of Italy's conservative and pro-U.S. government warned of nothing less than a systemic breakdown. Giulio Tremonti excoriated the 'voracious selfishness' of speculators and 'stupid sluggishness' of regulators. And he singled out Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, with startling scorn." "'Greenspan was considered a master,' Tremonti declared. 'Now we must ask ourselves whether he is not, after [Osama] bin Laden, the man who hurt America the most. . . . It is clear that what is happening is a disease. It is not the failure of a bank, but the failure of a system. Until a few days ago, very few were willing to realize the intensity and the dramatic nature of the crisis.' "The system is collapsing, exactly like the Albanian pyramids collapsed,' Tremonti said. 'The idea is gaining ground that the way out of the crisis is mainly with large public investments. . . . The return of rules is accompanied by a return of the public sector.'" Okay, okay. So our shit's a little fucked up right now. But here's one thing: We don't have to take any crap from the likes of fucking Italy. How are your Neo-Nazi soccer riots going? And, what're you guys on now? Like your 24th "Republic" since Mussolini? Give it a rest. And don't get me started on Spain, Germany and France. [LAT]
Scorelogix, a research firm which has created an index of job security, says — no surprise! — that the chances of keeping your job dropped again in August. This was before this week's six-figure layoffs, mind you. The good news? There are some industries where job security is rising.
The huge sum of $125 million for animal-loving British artist Damien Hirst's London Sotheby's auction set a new record for a sale of a single artist's work, which should be a relief for the contemporary art market. "Golden Calf," a bull suspended in a tank of formaldehyde, sold for $18 million and also became the highest price of a Hirst sold ever. "The Kingdom," a shark also preserved in formaldehyde, sold for $17 million. But it isn't good news for everyone in the art world. What's really significant about the sale is that Hirst is selling over two hundred of his works to Sotheby's directly. This cuts his dealer completely out of a commission, which may be great money for Hirst and the art market, but is a bad precedent to set for gallerists—all the time they spent supporting young artists, only to be abandoned when they hit big.
The Valley's latest extreme sport is feigning nonchalance about the economy. Living in an earthquake zone requires developing a habit of stoic flinchiness. The economy's seismic shifts are slower, but just as unpredictable; all one can do it shrug one's shoulders, stock the emergency kit, and keep on living. "We're watching the economy crater all around us, but ... well, we're not really seeing any direct impact," writes Tech Ticker anchor Sarah Lacy. "Making things more uneasy for those here in 2000: We didn't cause this one." Lacy's right to reach back in history for examples, but her timing is off. This is 1998 all over again.The Asian financial crisis had roiled markets for a year, much as the credit crunch has done. Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund, required an elaborate Wall Street rescue, backed by the Federal Reserve, foreshadowing Bear Stearns. All this happened, mind you, while Mark Zuckerberg was still in junior high. In the Valley, meanwhile, the first Internet boom was just starting to unfold. Towards the end of the year, Henry Blodget, then a Wall Street stock analyst, set a $400 target for Amazon.com shares. The talk of market-watchers was how the technology-heavy Nasdaq index had uncoupled itself from the gyrations of the Dow. But surely it would come to an end, right? Then as now, that was the question on everyone's mind. It did end, but not in 1998, and not in 1999. The Valley's Teflon economy just raised expectations further, contributing to the wildness of the boom and the harshness of the bust, which unfolded in wearying slow motion from the Nasdaq peak in March 2000. The buoyancy of technology in the '90s only served to sink us, come the new millennium. That's where I think we are: Not 2000, but 1998. In the lull before the storm, the wild upward ride before the crash. A tech recession now might actually be healthy, since so many are braced for it. Strategy Analytics reports that the second quarter was the slowest rate of growth for digital media in two years, since the research firm started tracking its index of online-advertising and e-commerce revenues. Ad-dependent companies are preparing themselves accordingly. Marc Andreessen talked about an economic "nuclear winter" before his social-network startup, Ning, raised $60 million; similar fears, if less bluntly voiced, drove Slide CEO Max Levchin to add $50 million to his startup's stash earlier this year. The risk of all these companies adding to their stock of dry powder is that, in the absence of a deep downturn, the Valley's leaders will be tempted to light it up. The lack of big exits is driving venture capitalists crazy; they want to hand their charges off to greater fools, so they can get back to hunting for the next plausibly big thing. Companies spending for spending's sake, to form the appearance of turbocharged growth and make companies look like IPO material, could return us to the bad old days of 2000. That, I think, is why so many here are secretly rooting for a downturn. They want to get it over with, before things get really wild. "The Great Web Wipeout," a work of speculative satire published by Wired in 1996, makes for instructive readings. The names will mean nothing to today's readers. But substitute "Twitter" for "Starwave," update Stewart Alsop's title from "computer columnist" to "venture capitalist," and you've more or less got a contemporary piece. Underlying the Valley's blue-skies optimism: The fear that the heavens are soon to open up with rain.
