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Top 10 at 10: The amazing Allan Hawkins; Chinese buying Hummer; Agreeing with Tony Alexander; Taxing tall people
June 3rd, 2009Here’s my Top 10 links from around the Internet in the last day or so at 10 am. I welcome your additions in the comments below. I cannot embed my dismissive scoffing sound.
1. Adam Bennett at the NZHerald has picked up on this NZX announcement on Friday that Allan Hawkins, the convicted fraudster of Equitycorp infamy, is raising NZ$10 million from small investors (NZ$500 minimum investment) through an issue of capital securities offering 9.25%.
Hawkins was sentenced to six years jail in 1993 on seven fraud and conspiracy charges on transactions totalling $520 million after one of the longest and most expensive trials in New Zealand history. However, Hawkins’ convictions are not disclosed in Cynotech’s prospectus for the issue.
This is amazing. How on earth are we supposed to take any prospectus approved by the Securities Commission seriously when a fraud conviction is not included? How much credibility can we give to the NZX when it allows the likes of Hawkins to raise money from Mums and Dads through its market?
2. Oh the humiliation. GM is selling its most All-American brand of stupid SUVs to the Chinese. Sichuan Tengzhong is buying Hummer for less than US$500 million, the WSJ.com reported.
3. The Chinese are not happy with America’s spend, borrow and print strategy to dealing with the financial crisis. Bloomberg reports Yu Yongding, a former Chinese central bank adviser, as saying he doesn’t believe America’s plan to reduce its budget deficit from 12.9% of GDP now to 3% at some stage. He also described the US Federal Reserve as the world’s biggest junk investor.
Yu said U.S. tax revenue is not likely to increase in the short term because of low economic growth, inflexible expenditures and the cost of “fighting two wars.”
China wants to know how the U.S. will withdraw excess liquidity from its financial system “in a timely fashion so as to avoid inflation” when its economy recovers, said Yu, now a senior researcher at the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
He questioned whether there would be enough demand to meet U.S. debt issuance this year.
“The balance sheet of the Federal Reserve not only has expanded like mad but is also ridden with ‘rubbish’ assets,” he said.
The irony of the world’s biggest communists telling the world’s biggest capitalists what to do is delicious. HT Mish.
4. This is a long read, but well worth it. Professor Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld from Yale looks at the demise of GM in depth and blames it on Roger Smith (Roger and Me) and the just departed Rick Wagoner. This gives a much nuanced look at the company and board culture that led the world’s biggest car maker to bankruptcy. A fascinating look at corporate cultures and how not to do it. HT Lance Wiggs.
5. Seth Godin says something I have believed for a long time: joint ventures never work.
6. BNZ economist Tony Alexander has an interesting take on the budget. He goes to the heart of the matter and points out our core problem is our lack of savings and our current deficit. I couldn’t agree more. I disagree with him on house prices, but he’s right on this.
Eventually we will get a credit downgrading because there is no sign that households intend structurally (permanently) lifting their savings level.
This means that apart from the short term cyclical improvement there is little reason for believing our current account deficit and foreign indebtedness position will be trending toward the better.
7. Nassim Taleb is launching a Black Swan Protection Protocol-Inflation fund for people to bet on hyperinflation and governments generally stuffing it up, Felix Salmon points out.
The upshot is that some year down the track – and it is 100 percent impossible to forecast which decade let alone which year – we will see a currency collapse and soaring interest rates.
8. Here is the video ad that Americans are watching in between news shows talking about the bankruptcy of GM. It is made by GM at some cost. Repeat after me: ‘I’m glad I’m not a US taxpayer’. This is a lesson in how not to do marketing. So many companies do this. They think marketing spend is the way to fix or repair a brand. The only way to fix a brand is to fix the product and the service first.
9. Here’s what happens when people get nervous about the value of their currency. People in Buenos Aires are hoarding coins. They’re now very difficult to get, the New Yorker points out.
10. This one caught my attention because I am 6 ft 5in (1.95m). Matt Nolan at TVHE looks at this whole debate about taxing tall people because they earn more. Needless to say, I don’t like the idea.
Tags: Allan Hawkins, Cynotech, GM, Matt Nolan, Nassim Taleb, Rick Wagoner, Tony Alexander, Top 10 at 10, Yu Yongding
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June 3rd, 2009 at 11:35 am
In reeducation camps during the Cultural revolution in China…people where taught taht the US was the poorest countries in the world. Technically, from a debt perspective, they where right. Being labeled the poorest country was one of the main reasons my partner’s father immigrated to NZ instead of the US in the mid 80’s. Now it seems it has become fruition, or at least common knowledge that the US is a second world economy.
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:40 am
Bernard
Surely there is some contradiction in Alexander’s views.
On the one hand he is very pro-housing and doesn’t seem to see any problem with kiwis getting neck high in mortgage debt (after all thats great for the bank that employs him), on the other hand he is acknowledging that we have a debt problem and need to save more.
he says we need to spend less on goodies – I would suggest that we in fact need to spend less on housing
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:50 am
And, Troy, from friends in California and Nevada – the social situation is becoming third-world, like other economies where the gap between have and have not has widened to an unsustainable point. These friends have all but become prisoners in their homes – helicopters from above routinely broadcast to the neighbourhood to stay in your homes, lock all doors, and provide a description of the armed offender they are looking for in the area. Problem is – they don’t buzz back over to tell you whether or not the person has been found.
One witnessed a fist fight in a grocery store over the last ‘half price’ lettuce on the shelf. She now shops online and has her groceries delivered. Security guards and the general public are scared to intervene.
More than one in every 10 households are living on food stamps. None of my friends walk their dogs anymore. Two of them have had their purses snatched and assume their identities stolen.
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:52 am
The Securities Commission is a standing joke. They aim to better the SEC and win the “fatheads” award of the year.
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:58 am
Yes, Tall people should pay more because they can see more.
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:21 pm
#4 was interesting. I think …
‘Smith was just one of a long line of “finance men” selected to lead the engineers and marketing executives known as the “car guys” ‘
…says it all really. How often have we seen this? From automakers, to airlines, to telcos.
Here is a blog post more about Pension Funds but it ties in with GM at the end:
http://pensionpulse.blogspot.com/2009/06/gms-final-clawback.html
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:25 pm
@ Kate
I’m from California and I’m getting similar updates form my boyz in the military that live in and around San Diego. Your description is very accurate. I have to fly back later this month. I’m not looking forward to driving around California without my gun.
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:49 pm
re the GM advert, the secret for survival & competitiveness apparently is “greater efficiencies, better fuel economy”.
Thats funny, I seem to remember GM a couple of years ago spending millions on bribing (sorry, I must stop doing that, I meant “lobbying”) Congress to not increase mandatory petrol standards, so that GM could continue to make inefficient gas-guzzlers like there was no tomorrow.
Must have been a different GM, I guess…………..
June 3rd, 2009 at 12:56 pm
@ Kate: Sounds just like Johannesburg before the elections of ‘92. I had a house with an iron panic room; within a gated complex surrounded by electrified razor wire, and lots of women had a pistol in their purse ( for use on themselves if required). Fortunately the elections went “well”, but as you elude, when the have-nots have nothing to loose…… That’s what inflation will bring to us. When one lives on $1 a day, buying a revalued 50c worth of ’stuff’ will not be enough to survive and that means we will have to get the razor wire out on our boarders.
June 3rd, 2009 at 1:16 pm
“This means that apart from the short term cyclical improvement there is little reason for believing our current account deficit and foreign indebtedness position will be trending toward the better.”
I remembered a short take on Paula Bennett on TVNZ Close Up saying that the goverment spends NZ$2 million per year on 9000 people in a place like Opotiki (Welfare and benefits) looks like that’s the way this country goes…until we reach the cliff !!
June 3rd, 2009 at 1:26 pm
No wonder gun sales are souring in the US.
-Also noticed the scary article about GM giving retirement funds to banks posted in another article here somewhere. It won’t be long now until events reach critical mass over there.
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Bernard, here’s a contender for Obama links – Spengler/David Goldman lets rip over at Asia Times. He’s always been a deep skeptic about BHO’s motivations, background and tendencies – it’s worth reading the archived pieces, too.
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KF02Ak05.html
If nothing else, The Great One’s coming piece of sonorous cluelessness will slip another floor under long-term interest rates, rattle cages and chains all over the world, and further undermine sovereign credit ratings. And as for currency gyrations in the wake of this….
Not bad for an hour’s work, eh?
But of course the MSM cry will, as always, be ‘Hoocoodanode?’
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Who said Mao was wrong sending all the academics, Land owners, And City folk to the communes in the country to melt there shovels, Dig holes and make bricks and generally learn the life of a peasant.
Take a “Great leap forward’ today and swap the above with who you like.
I look on with mirth wearing my “chairman Mao” collar shirt.
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Australian GDP figures just out:
http://business.smh.com.au/business/australia-dodges-recession-20090603-buyq.html
Quote: ”We’ve dodged the recession bullet for the time being”
June 3rd, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Kate/Janet.
I believe there is a concerted effort from worlds media suppressing news about civil disturbances.
You are getting all sorts of right wing lunatics popping up in Europe. With a bigger following by the day.
I was in Capetown 91? 1 month after elections and people were frightened allright. After spending time living/working in SA,Namibia,E.Guinea,Nigeria,Zambia and Zimbabwe you get too know the “heartbeart” of the people. I’m more than disturbed over J.Zuma and ANC for the future.
Kate, What did hurricane Katrina teach you??? What it taught me was how quick society could break down into total mayhem.
I also spent time(X3) in Argentina and everytime was some different calamity.
I guess what I’m saying is a country is only as good as the people in it. Whether through education, wealth or standard of living.
Look at Eastern Europe for example. Ie 1989 overnight they went from communism to nothing….from an ordered and structured society to nothing…ie no food , coal, …Did it break out into Kaos…NO…!!! I often thought what would happen to NZ if under same circumstances..
If that happened in USA would it break out into Kaos.You betchya…Incidently i was at the 10th anniversary to the fall of communism in Wencelas Sq in prague in 99..
Sorry for rambling but this subject intrigues me a lot…
June 3rd, 2009 at 4:51 pm
“10. This one caught my attention because I am 6 ft 5in (1.95m). Matt Nolan at TVHE looks at this whole debate about taxing tall people because they earn more. Needless to say, I don’t like the idea.”
I’m short – I think its a great idea
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Nothing wrong with getting a bit off-piste from time to time, Boyesy! Makes a change from flogging the ‘will it or won’t it’ housing horse…..
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Here,here Janet.
Time to conform though.
5. Seth Godin says something I have believed for a long time: joint ventures never work.
Bernard this makes me cringe……Heres Why!
Without “Joint Ventures” ( legal sense)…NZ would’nt have a fishing industry. Sanfords and the Koreans, Sealords and Russians/Polish and Amaltal and the Japs…
..Its been so successful that 60% of ALL NZ fish is caught by them and what remaining NZ crew is on the minimum wage…
Refer NZ fishing industry Guild v;s Sealords,Amaltal. (whether crew are below minimum wage) 2005.
If it was’nt for the highly “successfull JV’s” NZ would have a fishing industry like Norways.
Incidently, NZ fishing industry guild building is below Sanford…Whose pissing in whose pockets?????
Like I say Bernard it is all in the wording (Joint Venture) that Foreign vessels, crew, cheap labour and worst of all NZ FISH can be squandered, that this can all happen…
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:06 pm
GM ad
http://www.kenrockwell.com/Images/jpg/2009-car-ad.jpg
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/00-new-today.htm
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:23 pm
California is a Super City isn’t it? If Auckland becomes a super city it should be prevented from putting strategic assets up as colateral for loans, local govt bonds especially.
If you want to find out why Sec-Com is so impotent;
http://socialcreditorbust.blog.co.nz/questionable%20intent%20of%20nz%20ceo’s/
March 4th, 2010 at 6:20 pm
I had a desire to start my company, however I did not earn enough amount of money to do it. Thank goodness my mate proposed to take the loan. So I used the short term loan and made real my desire.