Tuesday, February 15, 2011

"The Good Old Days" -- How About A Little Perspective, Though?

Buddy of mine sends one of those Nostalgia pieces that circulate around the Web -- You know, "Do you remember when.... Gas was 25 cents a gallon and they cleaned your windshield? Laundry detergent had prizes inside? A '57 Chevy was the car everybody wanted? Nobody ever locked their doors? The slower pace? Less stress, fewer dangers?

Well, yes -- there were great things about The Old Days -- in this case, the 1950s... But a little perspective is sometimes called for.

Heck, most of this stuff was gone by the time we were 12.

And the rest of it by the time we were 18.

Yes, gasoline was 25 cents a gallon -- and our dads earned a lot less than $10,000 a year, and that only by working lots of overtime.... And even though you could buy more with a dollar then -- people were, simply put, much less prosperous back then.

TV was in black and white, was 12 or 15 inches wide, and came with only three or four channels.

And we didn't worry about fattening ice cream and soda pop and beef dinners and lots of butter on our bread. Because we didn't know that 50 years later we'd be paying the price for our ignorance.

And kids actually got polio, and the Russkies were threatening to A-bomb us to the ice age, and cars had no safety features to speak of, and you couldn 't just look something up on Google and get an answer in a few minutes, and you had to write letters by hand on paper and put a stamp on an envelope and mail it -- so you never really bothered. And if you wanted a quick cup of coffee you had to get out the percolator - remember those? - set it up and brew a quart of the stuff. And there weren't any microwaves to zap-heat up some leftovers, and fridges were iceboxes, and the bottles of milk brought by the nice milkman at 5am would freeze in a January morning; and air travel was so amazingly expensive that we didn't even know anybody who had ever flown in a plane, or been overseas, unless they were a GI. So if your parents wanted to go to Europe on vacation they had to take a boat, which took a week each way. And the only way to get to California, or Florida, was by car, over several days. Which was wonderful in memory, but not so wonderful if you were stuck with that method always.

Yeah, the good old days had a lot of charming things; some of those charming things are charming because we've forgotten about or were too young to be aware of the less charming parts that made them possible.

In a dream world - the one nostalgia like this puts us in - we'd have the best of both -- the charm of the old days, with the comfort, low prices, airbags, and 500 channels of today.

And Google.

Monday, February 7, 2011

Business: Everybody buying everybody else is a good sign-- I think!

AOL just bought a publication site called The Huffington Post. For $300 million.

Several other big companies have paid hefty prices for several other smaller or newer companies.

All in the past month or so....

A burst of deals, especially ones at high prices consolidating industries, occurs on the way to a market recovery.

When the recession hits hard, businesses hunker down: They cut costs, find efficiencies, and if the are profitable, they conserve cash rather than expand, waiting for future opportunities.

Meanwhile, the government slashes interest rates in hopes of stimulating business. The idea is to make it cheaper for businesses to borrow money to expand or launch new initiatives. But generally, they don't -- instead, they refinance any debt to lower their costs, again.

But on the side, businesses also realize that zero interest rates also means that the pile of cash they're sitting on isn't generating returns. So one fine day they wake up and decide to put it to better use by buying competitors, new markets, or hot startups. Especially irresistable are companies that could use a cash infusion, and so are for sale cheap. Or cheaper than they'll be when the economy recovers later.

So they start buying companies. And boom -- this generates the economic stimulus the government was looking for but not finding.

And....we're back!

I only hope it's true this time too.