Which is why the US should cancel the bonuses of every man jack they feel ought not to be paid and go to court where a JURY will try the case. Can you imagine the fun trying to seat an unbiased jury? Sir, goes a question, have you ever read that pap Atlas Shrugged from the economically illiterate author Ayn Rand?
Even if the government loses it will take years and they can then pay in the debased dollars they are creating with such gusto.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
NREGS and the World Bank and how NREGS has helped my company and its suppliers
Trust the phony capitalists at the World Bank to come up with ever more rubbish. The latest is how the NREG payment is keeping people on the land and therefore delaying the formation of more cities with their higher pay, better standard of living etc.
First, I would like the concerned economist to come and work at my factory where I will pay him minimum wage and find him a suitable hovel in which to live. I will also arrange for him to go live on NREG dough in a suitable village close by. He can then decide which is better.
Second, many have decided that the latter is better, so much so that the year NREG began payouts, it caused a great labour shortage in the area of our factory. Minimum wages, fixed by the government at low rates to satisfy the whiners at our chambers of commerce, were breached and this side effect of NREGS has lifted the income of many a labourer.
Third, because these fellows (and because of our sexist labour laws most are fellows) are utterly unskilled and unreliable, the boost in their pay gave us an incentive to replace them with fabulously skilled Indo-Austrian and Indo-Japanese workers.
We commissioned a local machine manufacturer to make us automatic machines where the duty cycle components are imported from the best European and Japanese makers. These have turned out really well - for the first time making high tech stuff in India has really worked for us - and we have been trying for 5 years.
Fourth, the machines are such path breakers in price and performance that our supplier has found takers for the same machine as an OEM from all four of the European machine makers they visited last week, and all at prices that make all parties only modestly unhappy.
Fifth, today there was more rubbish from the IMF on how we must spend buckets more on infrastructure - more roads they say. Gents, there are two things:
a) The machine referred to above will travel six to a container and each container will have the value added of 36 containers of clothes and shoes, the manufacturing the buggers at the WB would like us to do. This may well also have probably the value added of 36 containers of Chinese flat screen TV's.
b) That kind of reduces the roads needed.
c) How come the IMF does not point out that removing the zillion checkpoints on Indian roads will approximately double road capacity without doing anything but cutting corruption?
Could it be that the IMF likes big spending projects because they and their consultants are part of the gravy train?
I wonder what poppycock these institutions can come up with to explain all of the above?
First, I would like the concerned economist to come and work at my factory where I will pay him minimum wage and find him a suitable hovel in which to live. I will also arrange for him to go live on NREG dough in a suitable village close by. He can then decide which is better.
Second, many have decided that the latter is better, so much so that the year NREG began payouts, it caused a great labour shortage in the area of our factory. Minimum wages, fixed by the government at low rates to satisfy the whiners at our chambers of commerce, were breached and this side effect of NREGS has lifted the income of many a labourer.
Third, because these fellows (and because of our sexist labour laws most are fellows) are utterly unskilled and unreliable, the boost in their pay gave us an incentive to replace them with fabulously skilled Indo-Austrian and Indo-Japanese workers.
We commissioned a local machine manufacturer to make us automatic machines where the duty cycle components are imported from the best European and Japanese makers. These have turned out really well - for the first time making high tech stuff in India has really worked for us - and we have been trying for 5 years.
Fourth, the machines are such path breakers in price and performance that our supplier has found takers for the same machine as an OEM from all four of the European machine makers they visited last week, and all at prices that make all parties only modestly unhappy.
Fifth, today there was more rubbish from the IMF on how we must spend buckets more on infrastructure - more roads they say. Gents, there are two things:
a) The machine referred to above will travel six to a container and each container will have the value added of 36 containers of clothes and shoes, the manufacturing the buggers at the WB would like us to do. This may well also have probably the value added of 36 containers of Chinese flat screen TV's.
b) That kind of reduces the roads needed.
c) How come the IMF does not point out that removing the zillion checkpoints on Indian roads will approximately double road capacity without doing anything but cutting corruption?
Could it be that the IMF likes big spending projects because they and their consultants are part of the gravy train?
I wonder what poppycock these institutions can come up with to explain all of the above?
Their mythology starts with the false premise that these are irreplaceable geniuses,” says Cuomo.
Last week, after many many years, I flew BA first class. Before you ask where I got the dough, I will tell you that I used up JP Morgan paid miles that I had been forced to hoard for years because BA never had seats. I bet on the economy returning to normal, or the rats cutting flights, and opted to use up all the miles at once before they expired or became again unuseable.
Tip: this is the time to use those miles because you will get the seats and dates you wnat.
On the way to Europe I fell into a chat with a Sindhi businessman who was going back to whichever out of the way place he made his living. He was delighted to be back in the saddle (first class) from which he had been excluded for the last many years because the banker bums were hogging the seats and paying prices that no one using their own money would ever pay. Look around, he told me contentedly, 70% of the people in first are Sindhi's. We all spend our own money and its cash so we have a budget: when we can, we go first; for a while we were afraid the bankers would so raise the prices of business that we would be in cattle for the rest of our lives.
While in Europe I met with numbers of mid sized business owners, with many friends and even cab drivers.
There is a reason that most Europeans do not want to boost demand. They think the Americans eat too much of the world already and do not want to help that balance (sic) return. Their politicians do not want to repeat Iraq, and not with money, which counts for everyone and not just a few soldiers. So, resist they will.
The American public is just as fed up with greedy bankers continuing to be paid tons. Frankly, I am with them. I was one, I know exactly how much I was worth and how much I was paid, and I know many of the senior ones getting paid even bigger buckets, and I know precisely how much they are worth. This last is a calculation anyone can do as it does not involve too many zeros.
While I sat with my suppliers in Europe we spoke only briefly about the current crisis. It is bad for business and we will all have to do what we can to survive in the short term. Most of the meeting was about what we were all going to have to do to boost labour productivity and cut the cost of capital by making things cheaper. Even the smallest company had a detailed two year product plan; the biggest had five or more years blocked out.
Nowhere did the US fit in any marketing or product (as opposed to sales) plan for any of these companies because they found it too hard to build for a mentality that may sell the company tomorrow, or where decisions are made on a personal level, or where the mix of machines is so vast in time (30 year old working alongside this year's model) that no one can actually measure productivity.
The flight back was instructive. Only three seats were taken in 1st class so the recession remains with us; the stewardess giggled a bit when I said that I really ought to check out business before I was forced to head there in time. Ha ha - we are off on vacation in two weeks. One friend who is on the same flight, but whose husband works in a normal job said we would be on the same flight but that she was in coolie. Well darling, quoth I, so are we. Later the same week, the wife of an Investment Banker informed me that she simply could not abide travelling coolie.
To complete my joy, a Master of the Universe was sitting behind me. We had a bit of a chat before take off where he promptly attacked India's profligacy in writing off farmers' loans. It was not the amount that mattered, but the fact that it set a precedent. He delicately skirted around the accepted economic wording.
Oh, I said, do you mean moral hazard of the sort that your government is so happily promoting amongst the banker classes?
Without a trace of embarrassment, but with a smirk, he said 'well, that had to be done'.
I fancy he did feel a bit of embarrassment when I bashed him with the bolshie line 'so, what's good for the filthy rich is not for the ragged poor'. But will he change? Will they change.
The fellow spent every hour of the flight calling his office and asking his myrmidons this or that trivial question about this or that trivial development at this or that trivial (given recent stock prices) company and then asking what they thought the effect would be on this or that country, or class of assets. In my minds eye I could see that between the calls his myrmidons were calling some other MoU's myrmidons with the same questions, so that by the end of the flight all M's and their m's would have the same groupthink.
The fellow concluded the last call that I overheard with the line: 'so we do not have to decide anything for the next hour or so'.
One hour at a time or five years at a time? You take your choice; I have taken mine - I will rot in hell before I allow people who decide one hour at a time to interfere with what I have built over years and where real people work making real things.
Tip: this is the time to use those miles because you will get the seats and dates you wnat.
On the way to Europe I fell into a chat with a Sindhi businessman who was going back to whichever out of the way place he made his living. He was delighted to be back in the saddle (first class) from which he had been excluded for the last many years because the banker bums were hogging the seats and paying prices that no one using their own money would ever pay. Look around, he told me contentedly, 70% of the people in first are Sindhi's. We all spend our own money and its cash so we have a budget: when we can, we go first; for a while we were afraid the bankers would so raise the prices of business that we would be in cattle for the rest of our lives.
While in Europe I met with numbers of mid sized business owners, with many friends and even cab drivers.
There is a reason that most Europeans do not want to boost demand. They think the Americans eat too much of the world already and do not want to help that balance (sic) return. Their politicians do not want to repeat Iraq, and not with money, which counts for everyone and not just a few soldiers. So, resist they will.
The American public is just as fed up with greedy bankers continuing to be paid tons. Frankly, I am with them. I was one, I know exactly how much I was worth and how much I was paid, and I know many of the senior ones getting paid even bigger buckets, and I know precisely how much they are worth. This last is a calculation anyone can do as it does not involve too many zeros.
While I sat with my suppliers in Europe we spoke only briefly about the current crisis. It is bad for business and we will all have to do what we can to survive in the short term. Most of the meeting was about what we were all going to have to do to boost labour productivity and cut the cost of capital by making things cheaper. Even the smallest company had a detailed two year product plan; the biggest had five or more years blocked out.
Nowhere did the US fit in any marketing or product (as opposed to sales) plan for any of these companies because they found it too hard to build for a mentality that may sell the company tomorrow, or where decisions are made on a personal level, or where the mix of machines is so vast in time (30 year old working alongside this year's model) that no one can actually measure productivity.
The flight back was instructive. Only three seats were taken in 1st class so the recession remains with us; the stewardess giggled a bit when I said that I really ought to check out business before I was forced to head there in time. Ha ha - we are off on vacation in two weeks. One friend who is on the same flight, but whose husband works in a normal job said we would be on the same flight but that she was in coolie. Well darling, quoth I, so are we. Later the same week, the wife of an Investment Banker informed me that she simply could not abide travelling coolie.
To complete my joy, a Master of the Universe was sitting behind me. We had a bit of a chat before take off where he promptly attacked India's profligacy in writing off farmers' loans. It was not the amount that mattered, but the fact that it set a precedent. He delicately skirted around the accepted economic wording.
Oh, I said, do you mean moral hazard of the sort that your government is so happily promoting amongst the banker classes?
Without a trace of embarrassment, but with a smirk, he said 'well, that had to be done'.
I fancy he did feel a bit of embarrassment when I bashed him with the bolshie line 'so, what's good for the filthy rich is not for the ragged poor'. But will he change? Will they change.
The fellow spent every hour of the flight calling his office and asking his myrmidons this or that trivial question about this or that trivial development at this or that trivial (given recent stock prices) company and then asking what they thought the effect would be on this or that country, or class of assets. In my minds eye I could see that between the calls his myrmidons were calling some other MoU's myrmidons with the same questions, so that by the end of the flight all M's and their m's would have the same groupthink.
The fellow concluded the last call that I overheard with the line: 'so we do not have to decide anything for the next hour or so'.
One hour at a time or five years at a time? You take your choice; I have taken mine - I will rot in hell before I allow people who decide one hour at a time to interfere with what I have built over years and where real people work making real things.
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