A chart of industrial production -- the output of manufacturers, miners and utility companies -- suggests that the economy is poised to turn around, but that the climb out of the current downturn will be a long one.
I'm not going to include all of Noteworthy's links in my version of this post, but in light of the graphic, this one is priceless:
Matt Taibbi:
If America is now circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain.
Twitpay has raised an undisclosed amount of angel financing and will launch a service that allows users to order and buy downloadable content, via Twitter.
The Atlanta-based social payments startup, launched four months ago, allows users to make payments of up to $1,000 through the micro-blogging phenomenon that Twitter has morphed into.
Twitpay is part of an eco-system of services and applications that is transforming Twitter from a social media site into a communications — and now an ecommerce — platform.
CEO Michael Ivey was tight-lipped on the details of the fundraise. After some prodding, he ventured to say that seed funding for Internet startups at Twitpay’s stage is generally less than $300,000.
Congratulations to Twitpay, the hottest concept to come out of Atlanta in some time.
noteworthy wrote: I don't mean to agitate, but it's interesting how the public demand for honesty and realism appears to be inversely proportional to the performance of the major indexes. In 2007, when the Dow first broke 12600, I doubt many people were saying: "after a fifty percent increase in the 'value' of the economy it's about damn time these people stopped blowing smoke and come clean about what the situation is so that the rest of us can make informed decisions." And the few people who asked such questions found themselves the laughingstock of Wall Street and Main Street alike.
Thats certainly true. Barry Ritholtz, who I started reading after DMV memed him a few times, called DOW 6800 in 2006, and was "the most bearish position of all 76 strategists in The BusinessWeek Market Survey." His view today on that call is "Prescient: The analysis as to what was structurally wrong in the economy, and what was likely to go eventually cause major problems. But the timing? Not so much." But when you've passed the most bearish estimate, what is left but the estimates being offered by the guys who are stockpiling guns?
It began as a sub-prime surprise, then became a credit crunch and is now a global financial crisis. At last month's World Economic Forum at Davos there was much finger-pointing - Russia and China blamed the US, everyone blamed the bankers, the bankers blamed everyone - but little in the way of forward-looking ideas. From where I was sitting, most attendees were still stuck in the Great Repression: deeply anxious, but fundamentally in denial about the nature and magnitude of the problem.
Scott Burkett’s Pothole on the Infobahn » Wifi Cat: The Backstory
Topic: Business
9:54 am EST, Feb 27, 2009
The following is my account of the Wifi Cat ruse we pulled off last week at Startup Riot 2009 in Atlanta. This is from memory, so the timeline may be a bit off here or there - but it will give you the gist.
High and Low Finance - Wall Street May Be Looking at Withering Wages - NYTimes.com
Topic: Business
4:01 pm EST, Jan 23, 2009
It is one thing when the best-paid people seem to be the smartest and the most accomplished. Those who make much less may not like it, but the differential seems understandable. It is another thing when those people are shown to have committed huge blunders that would have driven their companies out of business, and them into the unemployment line, but for government bailouts.
Your parents might have worried when you chose Philosophy or International Relations as a major. But a year-long survey of 1.2 million people with only a bachelor's degree by PayScale Inc. shows that graduates in these subjects earned 103.5% and 97.8% more, respectively, about 10 years post-commencement. Majors that didn't show as much salary growth include Nursing and Information Technology.
Wow. Things have certainly changed a great deal in the past 10 years. Here is the definition of "mid-career:"
Full-time employees with 10 or more years of experience in their career or field who are Bachelors graduates.
For the graduates in this data set, the typical (median) mid-career employee is 42 years old and has 15.5 years of experience.
I get the impression that in general, there is a stronger correlation between age and salary than there is between merit and salary.
Dow 4,000. Food shortages. A bubble in Treasury notes. Fortune spoke to eight of the market's sharpest thinkers and what they had to say about the future is frightening.
Nouriel Roubini, Bill Gross, Robert Schiller, Sheila Bair, Jim Rogers, John Train, Meredith Whitney, Wilbur Ross
