Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Yes - I am coming back.

I am the kind of girl that when I get anxious I sort of shut down.  And since there isn't really any new tech or cars or anything - the only thing I want to talk about it the frightening stuff coming out of other economies. But since the stock market is at an all time high and the consumer is still spending - it seems pretty ridiculous to blog this. I am not a perma bear.

In the 80's it didn't matter what the rest of the world did. But after 20 or 30 years of offshoring I just don't believe that what is happening in the rest of the world won't stick to us. The rest of the world is in recession. I think we are also in recession we just don't know it yet. And the wide divergence just makes me feel horrible and crazy. You just can't look at any chart and not feel the way do. Yet - most people don't look at charts. So.....

6 comments:

  1. That is a cute video. Always a goodie, but I respectfully disagree. What the market is basically saying right now is - there is no recession, but if we are wrong we are going to preemptively cut interest rates. And if we are further wrong we might do that again. They are calling it "an insurance cut". Because they always like to rename things so it doesn't seem as scary.

    Lately everyone has been talking about "a new paradigm' we are entering in which I thought they meant higher interest rates. Now I have come to understand they mean zero to negative interest rates. 25 countries are, or still in, negative interest rates. The growing talk about this being the new normal is pretty freaky. Even Doomberg last night said there is a very real possibility that the US could fall into negative interest rates. The rest of the world is puke worthy, and we are an export driven economy. When that starts bleeding into employment and spending I don't know.

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  2. I’m a permabear, besides fear sells too well in an election year. If we go into a recession for 2020 who gets the blame president super money bags or the socialcrats? df

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  3. DF- (smile) I see what you did there. I haven't come up with a new nickname yet. I'm starting to try out teflon Don. I know someone already claimed that title. But I've been on job sites -and I know that Trump is only saving what ALL those guys think. But even I'm surprised how nothing sticks to him. People are like - oh my gawd why I never. Whisper whisper - he is kinda right. But I think the recession needs to happen this year for it to be a distant memory next year. And judging by the looks of things......there is a very good chance of that happening. Even Obama had car demand to pull forward. I don't know what Trump is going to do.

    Leaperman - I am not at all surprised about that. I've been saying for years that I thought people didn't want to actually do business in China, but were forced to by Google and Facebook and all the VC's. It was written into ALL their contracts for them to get any money. They had to go to China. Legit financial hostages by the big pockets. I saw story after story at conferences and I just couldn't believe it. Now that the spell has been broken we will see who REALLY wants to make things in CHINA.

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  4. Capital of Texas RefugeeTuesday, August 27, 2019 2:37:00 AM

    "But even I'm surprised how nothing sticks to [DT] ..."

    I'm going to make this really easy for you. :-)

    Does this {enemy, frenemy, blame agent, noisy mouthpiece, notional stakeholder, etc.} have any actual standing in your world?

    If the answer is "no", then you don't have to listen to this person.

    You can choose to listen to this person, but there's nothing actually forcing you to listen to this person.

    And so DT makes this easy for himself and for everyone around him: the only enemies that are an actual threat are the ones with actual standing.

    Everyone else plays a game in which they're trying to invoke misdirection in order to get some attention for whatever cause celebre they think they happen to have.

    Mouthy media hacks? FAKE NEWS!

    So about what's been going on then ...

    Before the sale, before I knew that there'd be a sale years before I was actually expecting it, I loaded up on pre-production supplies from Shenzhen. That was based on the assumption that the current PRC/USA flap wasn't going to go away and that there would be some moderate disruptions that would slow down or outright prevent the development of prototypes.

    Because I did that, it turned out that the on-hand stock was a relevant factor in our ability to gain standing with some people who were in a mood to buy.

    Those people are not in the mood to pay US taxes over the long term except on products sold in the US, on employees in the US, and so forth.

    When it was me running things, I was slow to make a choice to get some tax advisors to set up a global tax strategy. The buyers aren't slow at that, and their plans involve some pretty big moves.

    Key engineers are going to be able to work wherever in the world they want, just as long as there's high-speed Internet, a decent phone system, and a non-crap airport nearby. But for everyone else, it's up in the air by role, and there may be some people let go.

    What I expect they're going to do is that they're going to leave the US presence be only a marketing and solutions consulting presence while everything else goes wherever it's going to go. Most of the products aren't even sold in the US, let alone marketed to the US, so that's going to be interesting.

    But as for whether these people are going to buy from the PRC, they're absolutely going to continue to do business in Shenzhen and they're going to have their manufacturing move to a mostly neutral location that is going to be closer to the bulk of the customers.

    That means it's not the Americas or APAC where these things are going to go down -- it's going to be somewhere in Europe outside the EU.

    Business as usual continues.

    Was I wrong to do business with the PRC for political reasons?

    My buyers not only don't think so, but also seem to be steering everything toward the Americas being a very small sales territory and not the HQ region.

    The bottom line: It's OK if you're running out of steam.

    I wasn't able to put the changes into place that I could see were needed, but I was also able to get out of the way through this sale so someone else can take things where they need to go. In other words, it's OK to admit that you're actually human and that you have limits like an actual human.

    It's also OK if people don't like you for saying that you don't have time for people's bullshit, especially if they don't have any actual standing.

    I don't know who came up with this rule that I've used for a while, and I'm not following it religiously, but here it is: anyone who doesn't have actual standing or isn't someone who is likely to get it gets anywhere between zero to five minutes of my time.

    Sometimes I'll shoot the shit with people because I want to.

    But when they get all Rules Agents and crap with me, I just stick to the time budget ...

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  5. "it's OK to admit that you're actually human and that you have limits like an actual human."

    That was actually very comforting to read. Honestly. Not sarcastically. I am always reaching to get to another place and sometimes I don't even realize I got to the last place and took a minute to enjoy it.

    I don't think it's wrong to do business in any other country. As long as the rules are the same for both sides. Slight advantage US be cause that's what you should want in a game. You should always ~want~ to win. Problem is these days, people want the other team to win.

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