The other day I was in a record store. Strike that; there is no such thing any more. CD store, I suppose, although they’re getting fairly rare. Anyway, this one was in Tilton at the Tanger Outlet. Music For A Song, it’s called. I was browsing through the CDs and came across a stack of discs by Jim Tyrrell. He’s a local artist, and I’m proud to say a good friend of mine.
It was really great to see Jim’s face looking up at me out of a rack of CDs. I don’t know if he’ll ever be seen anywhere else, but he certainly deserves to be. Very talented musician and songwriter, and I highly recommend that you get yourself a copy of his disc at your nearest record store . . . or whatever they’re called nowadays. There’s even a link to his blog right over there, no not there, yeah, right . . . right THERE.
There’s two reasons his CD is on sale at Music For A Song. One is that Jim is very talented. The other is that he’s driven. I think he still harbors dreams of one day being a big star. Not only can he play, sing, and write, but he works very hard on his craft. And even if he never gets to sell his CDs anywhere else, you can bet you’re going to get a quality product.
For myself, at the ripe old age of 53, I’m no longer worried about hitting the big time. That ship has sailed. No worries. Hey, at this point if I did get offered a record contract I couldn’t afford to take it. No way could I quit my job and go on the road. You know what the odds are of a new artist breaking through and having a hit? They’re astronomical. For every Dave Matthews, or Michael Jackson, or Hannah Montana, there’s a hundred – maybe a thousand – people that somebody thought was worthy of a record contract that sell three or four hundred copies and disappear without a trace.
That doesn’t stop me, though. I just flat love to write and play, and I’m going to keep right on doing it. And I know plenty of other very talented people who keep doing it, too. Here are some of them.
http://www.myspace.com/cobaltbluevt will get you to the myspace page of the best damned blues band in New England, Cobalt Blue. These guys rock. I’ve seen them as a 3-piece and a 5-piece. I also have their CD, which is excellent, and I mean that. I have a number of CDs and cassettes by friends and acquaintances that I never listen to. Sorry, but a lot of that kind of thing simply isn’t that good. Sometimes there are good reasons that somebody doesn’t get signed, y’know. But Cobalt Blue’s CD is on my player regularly.
The whole band is great, but the guy that most impresses me is the guitarist, Mike Bottiggi. He’s a graduate of the Hendrix/SRV school, but takes it to his own place. He also is a tube amp rebuilder/fixer/toaster who’s got the tone that comes right out of the ground and straight up your spine. You cannot listen to this guy and not be moved. They are based in Northern Vermont, and are worth travelling for.
http://www.abandcalledspike.com/?mpf=frame is for A Band Called Spike. If you like your rock hard, this is the place to go. What would you call this stuff? Punk metal? That’s probably pretty close. To tell you the truth, I don’t listen to a lot of this kind of music, but they do it very well. Jim Alger, the band’s guitarist and vocalist, is a very old friend of mine, but even that wouldn’t get him mentioned here. The reason I’m mentioning him and them is that they’re very, very good. The other day I put in the live DVD I have of them, and it’s great. Even though I don’t make this variety of music my first choice, they are compelling. They’re based in Massachusetts.
A good musician needs a good instrument, right? If you’re a guitarist, like I am, you owe it to yourself to check out Green Mountain Guitars at http://www.greenmountainguitars.com/index1.html. Glen DeRusha makes some of the best acoustic guitars I’ve ever played, and it is my goal to one day own one. Check out some of his craftsmanship at this site. Or better yet, get yourself over to Bradford, Vermont and see them first hand. Believe it or not, Glen loves to have people drop by and play his instruments, or even just hang around and talk guitars and music. He even lets me do it! What a guy!
Friday, January 30, 2009
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Billions, trillions, and 1932
What is a house worth? That’s one of the primary questions facing the United States of America on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Obama.
We’ve already set aside something in the neighborhood of seven hundred billion dollars to bail out the banking industry. $700,000,000.00. Just what is so industrious about a bank, anyway? Isn’t an industry something that makes something? Anyway, the reason the banks got in so much trouble was the bursting of the housing bubble.
What the bubble was full of was the hopes of an awful lot of people. They stupidly accepted a con. Some bank – and that term has become very, very loose – convinced them to sign for a loan on a house. The interest rate was low for the first, oh, say, three years or so. Then, it went through the roof. It said so right there on the paper. Hell, it said so on the TV commercials. I would watch those commercials and think to myself, "Who on God’s green earth would be stupid enough to sign up for one of those rip-offs?" Now we know.
So they defaulted on the loans. By the thousands, they defaulted. Red ink flowed like the Black Sea. And there sit the houses. What are they worth now? That really is the question, isn’t it?
Somebody buys a house. After three years and the adjustable rate adjusts, they can’t afford it any more. They default. But the house isn’t gone. It’s right there. Somebody owns it. And whoever owns it wants to sell it. Maybe they won’t get ten cents on the dollar, but they’ll sell it.
Let’s say the house went for a hundred thousand dollars. $100,000.00. Based on the neighborhood and the going rate for houses like it, that was the price. You sign a loan, and in the next thirty years you may actually have to pay nearly twice that, but the house is worth a hundred grand. Until you can’t make the payments. The bank takes it back, puts it on the market. After a few months, they’re willing to take 75 thousand. Then sixty. Then fifty. Sounds like they’d have been better off letting you refinance.
The whole 700 trillion figure is written on the air anyway. Think about this; you’re a real estate speculator. You own ten pieces of property, each worth a hundred grand. You’re worth a million dollars. But if you can’t get your price, you’re not worth that much. So if AIG, Bear-Stearns, etc. can’t get their price for all those houses, they aren’t worth as much as their stock says they are. And the price of the stock goes down. Crash.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the houses. Same house. Maybe even same people living in them. But if they’re worth less on the market, the value of the bank goes down.
So what? It’s not really an industry, remember? They don’t build the houses, they just own them. If a bank is worth ten billion because it owns ten thousand houses, and the price of the houses goes down, they’re worth less. They base their expenditures on the worth of the company. Everything from office supplies to the number of employees . . . to the bonuses of the top executives.
So now let’s say you’ve got a bank that’s worth ten billion, run by a CEO that is contracted to receive ten million. When it’s 1%, it doesn’t sound like much. When it’s suddenly 5%, and you’re laying off tellers and bookkeepers, it begins to look like a lot of money. And believe you me, the banks that will be getting the bailout money pay their CEOs a lot more than that. And now they won’t be getting that money from the sale of houses. They will get it from us.
I think I’m beginning to understand what a Republican must have felt like in 1932. A new President is about to take office and he’s talking about a stimulus package. A big one. One that will dwarf the TARP fund of 700 large. Oh, we’ve got to do it, just gotta!!!! Everybody says so. Everybody says, in fact, that the paltry 850 billion, that’s Billion with a B, isn’t enough!!!!!
I, the conservative taxpayer that I am, have my hand firmly clamped on my wallet. It won’t do me any good, but it’s all I can do. I listen to the talk about teacher training and bridge construction and road repairs and I know that these are all the government handing itself my money. They take it from me, and you, and pass it around amongst themselves and we’re supposed to be grateful that when they’re tired and need to go home they buy their groceries in the private sector.
The thing is, I am the child of people who grew up during the Great Depression. I’ve not only read the history books, I’ve heard the stories of people who lived through the real thing. This is exactly how FDR brought us out of the GD, and he really did. Rush Limbaugh can kiss my ass, because FDR really did save the country.
But it’s not 1932. The day Herbert Hoover handed over the key to the executive washroom, unemployment was over 25%. That means one in four workers wasn’t.
The depression lasted through the thirties right into World War 2. Wars are expensive, so that brought the economy back. There was a recession following the war, but in the 50’s and early 60’s everything boomed. Then toward the end of the Johnson administration we slipped back into a recession that lasted through the 70’s. The year I got out of the Navy, which was 1976, unemployment was over 10%. The last year before the 1980 election the Gross National Product rose 0.3%.
It took until 1982 for things to start turning around. So when someone talks about the Reagan Recession of 81-82, it was really the Johnson/Nixon/Ford/Carter recession. Reagan ended it.
The bank bailout will ensure that nothing in the bank business will really change. The Obama stimulus package will ensure that we’re still in recession in 2012. Take it . . . to the bank.
We’ve already set aside something in the neighborhood of seven hundred billion dollars to bail out the banking industry. $700,000,000.00. Just what is so industrious about a bank, anyway? Isn’t an industry something that makes something? Anyway, the reason the banks got in so much trouble was the bursting of the housing bubble.
What the bubble was full of was the hopes of an awful lot of people. They stupidly accepted a con. Some bank – and that term has become very, very loose – convinced them to sign for a loan on a house. The interest rate was low for the first, oh, say, three years or so. Then, it went through the roof. It said so right there on the paper. Hell, it said so on the TV commercials. I would watch those commercials and think to myself, "Who on God’s green earth would be stupid enough to sign up for one of those rip-offs?" Now we know.
So they defaulted on the loans. By the thousands, they defaulted. Red ink flowed like the Black Sea. And there sit the houses. What are they worth now? That really is the question, isn’t it?
Somebody buys a house. After three years and the adjustable rate adjusts, they can’t afford it any more. They default. But the house isn’t gone. It’s right there. Somebody owns it. And whoever owns it wants to sell it. Maybe they won’t get ten cents on the dollar, but they’ll sell it.
Let’s say the house went for a hundred thousand dollars. $100,000.00. Based on the neighborhood and the going rate for houses like it, that was the price. You sign a loan, and in the next thirty years you may actually have to pay nearly twice that, but the house is worth a hundred grand. Until you can’t make the payments. The bank takes it back, puts it on the market. After a few months, they’re willing to take 75 thousand. Then sixty. Then fifty. Sounds like they’d have been better off letting you refinance.
The whole 700 trillion figure is written on the air anyway. Think about this; you’re a real estate speculator. You own ten pieces of property, each worth a hundred grand. You’re worth a million dollars. But if you can’t get your price, you’re not worth that much. So if AIG, Bear-Stearns, etc. can’t get their price for all those houses, they aren’t worth as much as their stock says they are. And the price of the stock goes down. Crash.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the houses. Same house. Maybe even same people living in them. But if they’re worth less on the market, the value of the bank goes down.
So what? It’s not really an industry, remember? They don’t build the houses, they just own them. If a bank is worth ten billion because it owns ten thousand houses, and the price of the houses goes down, they’re worth less. They base their expenditures on the worth of the company. Everything from office supplies to the number of employees . . . to the bonuses of the top executives.
So now let’s say you’ve got a bank that’s worth ten billion, run by a CEO that is contracted to receive ten million. When it’s 1%, it doesn’t sound like much. When it’s suddenly 5%, and you’re laying off tellers and bookkeepers, it begins to look like a lot of money. And believe you me, the banks that will be getting the bailout money pay their CEOs a lot more than that. And now they won’t be getting that money from the sale of houses. They will get it from us.
I think I’m beginning to understand what a Republican must have felt like in 1932. A new President is about to take office and he’s talking about a stimulus package. A big one. One that will dwarf the TARP fund of 700 large. Oh, we’ve got to do it, just gotta!!!! Everybody says so. Everybody says, in fact, that the paltry 850 billion, that’s Billion with a B, isn’t enough!!!!!
I, the conservative taxpayer that I am, have my hand firmly clamped on my wallet. It won’t do me any good, but it’s all I can do. I listen to the talk about teacher training and bridge construction and road repairs and I know that these are all the government handing itself my money. They take it from me, and you, and pass it around amongst themselves and we’re supposed to be grateful that when they’re tired and need to go home they buy their groceries in the private sector.
The thing is, I am the child of people who grew up during the Great Depression. I’ve not only read the history books, I’ve heard the stories of people who lived through the real thing. This is exactly how FDR brought us out of the GD, and he really did. Rush Limbaugh can kiss my ass, because FDR really did save the country.
But it’s not 1932. The day Herbert Hoover handed over the key to the executive washroom, unemployment was over 25%. That means one in four workers wasn’t.
The depression lasted through the thirties right into World War 2. Wars are expensive, so that brought the economy back. There was a recession following the war, but in the 50’s and early 60’s everything boomed. Then toward the end of the Johnson administration we slipped back into a recession that lasted through the 70’s. The year I got out of the Navy, which was 1976, unemployment was over 10%. The last year before the 1980 election the Gross National Product rose 0.3%.
It took until 1982 for things to start turning around. So when someone talks about the Reagan Recession of 81-82, it was really the Johnson/Nixon/Ford/Carter recession. Reagan ended it.
The bank bailout will ensure that nothing in the bank business will really change. The Obama stimulus package will ensure that we’re still in recession in 2012. Take it . . . to the bank.
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