Fareed Zakaria Waxes On About Canada 1
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out Fareed Zakaria swooning over Canada. I do think he paints an overly sunny picture and he starts making it sound like almost anything Canadian is inherently great (which I’ll claim is true to my American friends, but amongst ourselves Canadians know better), but the gist of his points are true. Honestly, I think a hybrid of what the US has and Canada has would be a great idea. Have the core of your banking system be large, boring, heavily regulated banks with very conservative leverage ratios; then allow for experimentation and risk taking in separate financial institutions, with the open acknowledgment that these institutions are inherently less reliable. When you think about it, that picture isn’t too far off from where the US was just over a decade ago. Hmmm….
How Bad Is The Tech Job Market Right Now? 1
The headline is Recession hits Silicon Valley as layoffs pile up and yet it fails to fully capture how the landscape has changed so rapidly in the last half a year. I was looking at my career options back then and was shocked to find just how much demand there was in the market. It seemed like the R word wasn’t going to ever be spoken in the tech sector. A few months ago, I was calling friends at Yahoo and other places, and trying to convince them to come work with me. While I wasn’t entirely unsuccessful, it was a non-trivial argument to make (which based on what you read in the press would seem impossible at least for Yahoos). This month…
…I get pings from people I’ve worked with, people I barely remember, and even recruiters. The latter show a shocking amount of compassion/desperation. I actually had a recruiter call me up today and offer to hand me a resume even though he knew we don’t work with outside agencies to keep our costs down, and so there could not be any compensation in it for him (and yes, this gesture will undoubtedly pay dividends when this mess comes to an end, but he has to know that may be a long way off and I’m sure he is as desperate to bring home the bacon right now as anyone). I’ve never seen a recruiter do something like that before. Not even during the .com bust years. THAT is how bad it is.
Hang on to your horses everyone, this is going to be a very bumpy ride… since we’re in LA you may choose to think of it as an economyquake. ;-)
Loonie Spanks the Yank 1
Apologies to those of you who thought that title was referring to something more lurid, but for a brief moment today, the Canadian dollar achieved and then exceeded parity with the US dollar. For those of you playing the home game, this means prices on Canadian imports to the US are going to shoot up (and the Euro and the Yen haven’t exactly been lying fallow either), producing added inflationary pressures in the US, or simply: “things are gonna get more expensive, and all those baby boomers who are retiring are going to find their savings doesn’t quite stretch as far as they thought”.
To put this all in perspective: in 2002, the Canadian dollar was below 62 cents US. Wikipedia has the full tale of the tape. You remember what happened in 2002? That’s right, our new congress and president decided to try out the combination of trickle-down economics and “don’t tax and spend” policies that worked out so well in the 80’s (note a similar, less dramatic climb in CDN$ valuation during that era). That’s also around when we started spending massive amounts of money invading “terrorist countries”. At the same time up in Canada the notion of cutting spending and paying off the debt suddenly became fashionable along with repatriation of the national debt. Now, I’ll be the first to admit correlation is not causation, but you might think there is some kind of a linkage between economic/monetary policy and currency valuations, right?
Now, there is a strange tendency to give the President too much credit and the Congress too little when it comes to budget management (as indicated by one of the graphs I link to tracking who was President when). In reality, the folks in government who probably deserve the most credit for the brief period of budget surpluses the US had in the 90’s would be the “Contract with America” Republicans who took over the House of Representatives during that era. They got an added boost from an explosively growing economy (credit for that is always difficult to assign, but probably should be spread thinly over congress, the president, Mr. Greenspan, and just about every working American from that era), but you have to give them credit for not seeing it as an opportunity to secure easy reelection by boosting spending.
Anyway, as a Canadian with some retirement investments up north, I thought I’d just hand out a big “thank you” to the US Congress. As an American living and working in California who likes to travel abroad (particularly to Canada) for vacations… the things I’d like to say are too expletive laden for me to print.