As I was walking out of the Gym today, I glanced at the TV monitors and the headline read, “Are Jobs Key to the Recovery?”…DUH, Of course, they are key. Part of the reason the market melted down was because Wall Street and the Great Pool of Money was busy doing deals and creating money out of thin air.
A recovery won’t happen until Main Street recovers along with the markets. What that means is real people doing real working making real things and selling them.
When I read of companies like Simmons Mattress who have been bought and sold, seven times in twenty years. With each successive buyout, the private equity buyers would then strip assets and cut resources to service the debt. The private equity firms made money and now Simmons is preparing for bankruptcy according to the New York Times. This is not real work by real people producing real products. This is what they call in the software world “vaporware”.
Let’s get back to producing and let the producers produce.
Take good care
The Simmons Matress example sounds like an example straight from the movie “Wall Street”. Buy a company, cut all expenses to the bone, sell off the parts for more than the original total, pocket the profit and move on to the next deal. That creates wealth for the deal makers, but not for anyone else. Unfortunately our tax code actually encourages this behavior. Until that changes, the “money changers” will still peddle their wares to the market.
Dave