Una lettura per non dormire la notte

 

  By: gianlini on Sabato 12 Gennaio 2002 20:50

riguardo alle mogli e ai mariti... devo dire che sinceramente il commento di ebreo errante (ma purtuttavia ormai stanziale per lo meno in questo sito, a quanto pare) mi sembra assolutamente corretto: nelle zone del nord è indispensabile guadagnare in due per vivere decentemente....ma questo non avviene per questioni economiche, ma per la nuova struttura sociale e soprattutto della spesa sociale... qui sbaglia ebreo errante la moglie di ebreo errante non lavora per sè e la propria famiglia, ma, purtroppo per qualche sotto-occupato al ministero dell'agricoltura, per qualche giovane pensionato 46enne con triplo lavoro, per qualche superparlamentare dallo stipendio di 50 milioni netti al mese, per qualche corrotto politico argentino (o di qualche paese africano; vedi voce "Aiuti ai Paesi del Terzo Mondo" o "Cancella il debito" cui tiene tanto il nostro buon Jovanotti). tutta gente che non c'era nel 1950 e che quindi i nostri genitori non mantenevano.... laddove poi le coppie di bi-lavoratori si concentrano è naturale che le coppie di monolavoratore si trovino a mal partito economicamente perchè i prezzi sono destinati a salire (gli stessi beni vengono offerti a migliori offerenti, e quindi vengono pagati meglio).

 

  By: michelino di notredame on Sabato 12 Gennaio 2002 16:18

per quel che so ci sono diverse americhe. la east coast e' una cosa, l'america profonda un'altra. anzi, due mondi diversi. a new york le donne lavorano perche' vogliono lavorare, e' una questione di cultura. nel tennessee si occupano della famiglia. l'america di Bush e' piu' quella del tennessee (infatti Gore giocava in casa, ma ha perso). la east coast e' 200 anni nel futuro, come mentalita'. tant'e' che Giuliani e' andato a vivere a casa dei suoi amici gay, per un periodo. cose del genere. comunque il livello di vita e' sempre altissimo, sia a new york che nel tennessee. e' spaventosamente alto. assolutamente unico nella storia dell'umanita'. solo il giappone ha fatto meglio, ora che ci penso. si tratta solo di vedere se il sistema regge. 50 o 70 anni sono pochi. questo e' un guado importante, per esempio. se lo passano e' una straordinaria dimostrazione di forza (non uso parole diverse da quelle di Usama, che ha definito l'economia americana "magnifica, ma fragile". per ora sopratutto magnifica.)

 

  By: ebreo errante on Sabato 12 Gennaio 2002 16:09

"complimenti, lei vince il tapiro di cartone di questo sito per il commento più ridicolo della settimana" Allora chiarisco il mio pensiero, così magari mi aggiudico anche il tapiro d'argento. Prendiamo il caso italiano che tutti ben conosciamo: negli anni '60 un impiegato od un operaio medio era in grado di mantenere col suo stipendio una moglie e due figli, aveva una macchina e se faceva qualche sacrificio si comprava pure la casa. Ho pochi anni meno di lei e questa è stata la realtà per la generazione dei nostri genitori. Adesso la maggior parte dei nostri coetanei che svolgono lavori dipendenti come impiegati od operai ha uno stipendio di 2-2.5 milioni con il quale si riesce a malapena a pagare l'affitto di un appartamento e il mantenimento della macchina. A differenza della generazione precedente sa anche di esser costretto a farsi una pensione integrativa, perchè la pensione statale che avrà alla fine dell'attività lavorativa è un'incognita . Un secondo stipendio in famiglia nella stragrande maggioranza dei casi dunque non è più una scelta ma una necessità per poter sopravvivere . Questo per me è un impoverimento di fatto delle famiglie italiane, perchè il benessere non è possedere 2 telefonini a testa e chattare in internet ma essere in grado di mantenere dignitosamente la propria famiglia con una ragonevole grado di sicurezza sul proprio futuro.

 

  By: GZ on Sabato 12 Gennaio 2002 13:04

resta il fatto che anche in Usa sino agli anni '60 bastava uno stipendio a famiglia per campare bene, ora anche le mogli devono lavorare. ---------------------------------- giusto, come noto i paesi più ricchi sono quelli musulmani dove nessuna donna lavora, e il meridione è più ricco del norditalia dove ci sono più donne spinte dal bisogno a a andare in ufficio complimenti, lei vince il tapiro di cartone di questo sito per il commento più ridicolo della settimana (creeremo un apposito spazio per valorizzare queste perle)

 

  By: dardarg on Sabato 12 Gennaio 2002 11:50

Nel 60 uno stipendio per famiglia era sufficiente perché c’era molto meno da spendere. come nei paesi sotto sviluppati dove si vive con poco perché c’è poco o nulla.

 

  By: ebreo errante on Venerdì 11 Gennaio 2002 21:58

Particolarmente interessante Zibordi ! Un altro fattore che pare abbia concorso molto alla sopravvalutazione dei profitti aziendali è stata la massiccia applicazione delle stock option ed il loro trattamento contabile. Le imprese Usa non sono infatti obbligate a contabilizzare nel conto economico le stock option assegnate ai dipendenti . Ma esse sono cmq un costo per l'impresa e il fatto che non siano contabilizzate migliora sensibilmente i profitti dell'azienda, solo quelli sulla carta però . Riguardo all'articolo postato da Funes, l'autore sostiene che la ricchezza degli Usa è aumentata nell'ultimo secolo molto di più di quanto mostrato dal pil . Coi numeri si può dimostrare tutto ed il contrario di tutto, resta il fatto che anche in Usa sino agli anni '60 bastava uno stipendio a famiglia per campare bene, ora anche le mogli devono lavorare.

 

  By: funes on Venerdì 11 Gennaio 2002 21:06

Questa è per massimo, e più in generale per i patiti del cash :-) ALEXANDRIA, Virginia - I prefer my companies to be young and nubile. A big mound of cash is a sign of inertia, like a roll of fat in the midriff. This is precisely why I suspect that graying high tech stocks that are trying to accumulate cash to qualify as "value investments" will disappoint their shareholders. Take Oracle, for example. Larry Ellison is said to be crowing because his company has accumulated $6 billion in net cash. This is a sure sign that Oracle is yesterday's news. The same goes for Microsoft, but six times more emphatically. With $36 billion in cash, Microsoft is impersonating a railroad company. It is hoarding far too much cash to have many rapidly growing applications up its sleeve. That fact, alone, tells you that Microsoft is no longer on the leading edge. I realize that it approaches sacrilege to question the business value of hoarding cash. But building a fortune through compound interest on a cash stash is as rare as understanding quantum mechanics. Which brings me back to the notion against which all stock investment is measured today, its relative merits as compared to bank balances, and the illusory hope of attaining wealth through compound interest. Trouble is, money doesn't keep much better than fish. A related misconception is this: it's too early to invest in stocks because they have not regressed sufficiently toward worthlessness to make them attractive to the Value Investor weaned on Graham & Dodd. Here are a few simple-minded metrics to support the case for stock investment. We have just concluded the second year in a row of negative returns from stocks. The benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 5% in each of the last two years. The S&P 500 fell 12 percents in 2001, following a 9% drop in 2000 (dividends included.) Other indices have fallen even more sharply. The leading technology index, the NASDAQ fell 21% in 2001, after dropping a painful 39% in the year 2000. The Lipper international mutual fund index sank 20% in 2001, following a 15% drop in 2000. It is notable that when the S&P falls during a calendar year, it almost always bounces back with a gain in the following year. In the 12 years that the S&P fell from 1941 through 1999, it rebounded in 11 cases the following year, with the average gain being 24%. The one exception occurred in 1974, when the S&P followed a down year in 1973 with another for a cumulative loss of 37% over the two years. Over the next two years, stock gained 70%. To find a three year losing streak in the S&P, you have to look all the way back to the eve of World War II, when stocks fell by a total of 21% from 1939 to 1941. Over the next four years, stocks gained 146%. To find a period of four consecutive losing years for the stock market, you have to go back to the depths of the Great Depression. I don't believe that we face such an environment today, unless you are living in Argentina, where unspeakably stupid government makes every investment an adventure. I say that having just lost a small fortune as the new Duhalde government has devalued the peso in an purported effort to make Argentina rich. Having the government drive down the value of its currency is like having a ceo sell short his own stock. It leads to nothing but disaster. But there is shortage of experts who thought that Argentina's currency board was horrid because it forbade the abracadabra of easy money as a cure for economic lethargy. Consider that Argentina was a wealthy country the last time the US stock market suffered three losing years in a row. In 1939, Argentine ranked fourth or fifth among all nations in automobile ownership per capita. It was in the top 10 countries in telephones per capita, and it enjoyed higher GDP per capita than Germany, Italy or France. Yet thanks to year after year of misgovernment and remorseless attempts to redistribute income, Argentina has fallen from 100% of Western Europe's GDP per capita as recently as 1950, to less than 50% today. Notwithstanding this sobering example of longterm economic decline in Argentina due to criminally incompetent, corrupt politicians there is good reason for optimism that the world economy will fare better than Argentina. It will rebound, and investment in the stock market will once again show positive returns. This is where the ghost of Benjamin Graham might be prone to interrupt my monologue with a fistful of objections. Here I am functioning more as a playwright than as an investment analyst, but he might be inclined to object that the rebound of the stock market in the four years after 1941 is immaterial to today's prospects because the market has not fallen far enough by value standards to correct for the "excesses" of the 1990s. I will take up that challenge and argue that Graham's arguments are anachronistic. If, indeed, the experience of stock investors from 1942 through 1945 is immaterial today, it is because technological innovation has created a more potent kind of compounding than the compounding of cash interest. In economic jargon, compound technical advances have continually pushed the economy's "production function" outward, to support ever higher levels of output per person. Rather than approach the question of growing economic potential in the way that enthusiasts for the "New Economy" did during the 1990s, and try to paint a picture of the wonderful new efficiencies engendered by computational power, I think it might be more fruitful to borrow an argument from economist Bradford deLong, and look backward. As he points out, there are severe measurement errors that understate the speed of economic growth in recent decades. As DeLong says, "when we talk and think about the past century or two, we grossly underestimate the magnitude of the economic growth that went on and is still going on -- even though our standard estimates of economic growth over the past century are quite high." A typical estimate, for example, would compare the time needed for an average worker to earn the purchase price of various commodities from a century ago versus today. If you took the Montgomery Ward catalog from 1895, and calculated the 1895 prices in terms of hours of work by the average person required to purchase them then, as compared to now, you would come up with roughly the same answer you would get from the Historical Statistics of the United States, namely that GDP per worker multiplied about five-fold during the 20th century, from the equivalent of about $12,000 in today's money to about $60,000 in today's money. But DeLong makes the crucial and compelling observation that the valuing of the past's production at present-day prices "leaves out an important part" of the picture. He says, "the standard calculations are flawed because our material wealth and productivity today have more dimensions than just the one of our increased capability to produce the goods that were made a century ago. They are flawed because there are many things we make today that were not made back in 1895: much of our wealth today lies in our ability to make a broader range of commodities than used to be possible. That broader range is not factored into the calculations." In other words, the standard valuation of the past's production at present-day prices says that "the material standard of living then was what we could obtain now if we had $12,000 to spend, but were required to spend it all on commodities that have been around for more than a century." Yes, we can make late 19th century goods more cheaply than they produced then, but a truer measure of economic growth should take account of the new goods and news services that we can produce today that did not exist a century ago. DeLong estimates that real economic growth has been understated by between 1% and 1.5% per year. Taking into account the decline in the number of hours worked per year, he concludes that material wealth has grown "not sixfold but thirtyfold over the past century." If DeLong's argument is right, as I believe it is, it has important implications, not just for the National Income Accounts, but also for investment. It strongly suggests that the "New Economy" is not just an empty buzz word or a figure of speech, but the principal focus of wealth creation. To understand how the stock market is likely to behave going forward, we should try to take the underestimated wealth creation from during the last century into account. One important way to do that is to bury the ghost of Benjamin Graham. Realize that every stock need not shrivel to a p/e ratio that might have been appropriate for a late 19th century or early 20th century industrial company with slowly growing or stagnant demand in order for selected stocks to rally significantly from here. Most of the new wealth could be created in sectors which never existed before. Companies like Visionics, Viisage Technology and Imagis do not need to retrace to invisibly low prices before a new industry can be created. It can be created now, with rapidly compounding growth, because the technological horizon for rapid compounding has been crossed.

Una lettura per non dormire la notte - gzibordi  

  By: GZ on Venerdì 11 Gennaio 2002 20:38

come noto i migliori scrittori di finanza sono quelli che predicono disgrazie. Quest'anno questo settore dell'informazione e dell'analisi è stato ricompensato per la prima volta dopo diversi anni grami. Uno dei migliori dei pessimisti è il famoso Richebacher qui sotto: spiega ad esempio come walls street e il governo si siano comportati in modo sospetto nel fissare alcune regole contabili per gli utili aziendali. Proprio ora infatti si è appena cambiato il modo di ammortizzare l'avviamento per aiutare le società a dare l'impressione di utili che con la vecchia regola non esistevano. Ad ogni modo ecco una bella lettura per non dormire la notte Dr. Kurt Richebächer CANNES, France - The bullish argument for the American profit miracle was that the alleged tech-driven acceleration in productivity growth would persist for years to come, leading to lasting, big gains in profit margins. The productivity mirage was the first erroneous assumption of the New Era. Productivity gains do not automatically accrue to business. Depending on conditions in the labor and product markets, they may be absorbed by lower prices or higher wages. We have argued all along, of course, for reasons explained, that there never was a productivity miracle in the first place. There are three phases of the U.S. current business and profit cycle. As shown, the magnificent part happened between 1992-95, well before anybody spoke of a new paradigm economy. In actual fact, profits received their main boost during these years from a plunging interest rate bill and an unusual decline in depreciation charges. Our focus has always been on the second phase from 1995 to 2000 as the cherished new paradigm boom years, during which profits according to the national income data rose overall just 20%, while the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 more than doubled. Not to speak of the Nasdaq, which more than quintupled. All this confronts us with three pertinent questions: 1. First, how could Wall Street impose the perception of a profit miracle that flagrantly contradicted the poor performance shown by the official National Income and Product Accounts? 2. Second, how do we explain this unusually poor profit performance? 3. Third, what is the further profit outlook? As to the first question, the answer lies in the rise of aggregate earnings per share as reported by the individual companies, and aggregate profits as calculated and reported within the framework of the NIPA. Over the last five to six years, they have differed like day and night. Earnings per share more than quintupled between 1992 and 2000 from little more than $10 to a peak of $56. After 1997, the surge even turned vertical, while the government's NIPA figures went into a drastic slowdown. These phenomenal growth rates of earnings per share supposedly justified the sky-high price-to-earnings ratios that the booming stock market delivered during the past few years. But the marvel was only in the quarterly corporate earnings reports. Official NIPA figures revealed a less than mediocre profit performance even before the downward revision of late July, considering that the economy was booming. How could the glorious perception of a profit miracle endure in the face of this preposterous incongruity in the available numbers? Very simple: Completely ignoring the dismal NIPA figures, analysts and investors had their eyes exclusively fixed on the heavily manipulated company-reported earnings. Observing this gross discrepancy between the two sets of figures, we have been sounding alarm all along. Very few others took offense. Most probably, the great majority of economists, analysts and investors never noticed. For believers in the new paradigm economy, the trumpeted profit miracle was in perfect conformity with the trumpeted productivity miracle. Remarkably, it's now the company-reported earnings per share that are taking the worst beating, being actually down by more than 60% against a year ago. Whopping write-offs and extraordinary charges to earnings are ravaging company-reported profits. All of a sudden, multi-billion dollar goodwill write-downs and restructuring charges are littering American and British corporate income statements. "Goodwill" in corporate balance sheets generally reflects the preposterous difference between the crazy prices paid for acquisitions in excess of the asset values shown in the books of acquired companies. Months ago, the Federal Accounting Standards Board decided to end the obligatory, gradual amortization of goodwill from the start of next year. Only when the assets lose value will they have to be written off. Could it be a sudden outbreak of honesty that is causing CEOs to act like this? Hardly. First of all, in hindsight it is all too obvious that the accumulated goodwill is in most cases truly worthless, adding nothing to profits. But there may be a second reason for this rush to write off goodwill. Though it may appear crazy to make losses look even worse, it is helpful in reducing expenses and enhancing earnings next year and thereafter. All of which inherently raises the question of the causal connection between today's huge write-offs and yesterday's glorious profit performance. Along with tame inflation, stellar productivity growth and low unemployment, outsized corporate profits were seen as one of the pillars of the New Economy that underpinned the stock market's bull run. Respected International Banker, Economist and Author Dr. Kurt Richebächer's articles appear regularly in The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, The Fleet Street Letter and other respected financial publications. France's Le ****ro magazine did a feature story on him as 'the man who predicted the Asian crisis.' Dr. Richebächer is currently warning readers to be cautious in the face of The Crisis Almost No One Sees Coming.