jon's stuff...

Sometimes I think there are about four honest, decent people left in the world. This guy seems to be one of them.

SHORT HILLS, N.J. (WABC) — A New Jersey CEO dipped into his own paycheck in a bid to stimulate the economy.

Jack Windolf gave $1,000 to all 434 workers at Bollinger Insurance Solutions and told them “let’s jumpstart this economy.”

Windolf says the idea came to him a year ago when he received $500,000 in deferred compensation after he orchestrated the sale of 51 percent of the Short Hills-based company. Windolf included a provision that said he could direct the money to other employees.

The CEO calls it the “Bollinger Mini Stimulus package.”

Employees were surprised when they found the envelopes in their mailboxes on St. Patrick’s Day.

Human resources vice president Maria Force says she’ll use the money to help her two kids in college.

via TechCrunch

This morning’s news about the latest unemployment statistics was dismal and quite sobering. The U.S. has lost 5 million jobs in the past 16 months, and the unemployment rate has hit a 25 year high, reaching 8.5%. Our own TechCrunch layoff tracker reports nearly 320,000 tech jobs lost since August. While jobs are being shed at an unprecedented rate, job listings are also being affected, both in tech and general employment sectors.

Tech jobs site Dice.com is reporting a 45% year over year drop in available technology jobs for March, continuing the drought of tech jobs in the economic downturn. This drop, as reported by Thomas Weisel Partners, is the highest annual drop Dice has seen so far this year, with February’s listings down 40.4% and January’s jobs down 39.3% (all year over year). In 1Q09, available tech jobs declined 41.4% year over year on Dice.com. Monster.com reports a 27% decline for Q12009 from last year, indicating that perhaps tech jobs are being hit harder than general job listings. And it seems that jobs hit an all time low in 1Q09, job listings declined 22% in 4Q09.

Dice said that of the ten reported metropolitan areas, Silicon Valley was hit worst, with available tech jobs down 57.7% year over year. Chicago (down 55.3% y/y) and Boston (down 55.3% y/y) also posted large declines. The Conference Board’s Online Help-wanted Index suggests that monthly job demand dropped 100K in March, down 31% year over year.

Our own job site, CrunchBoard, has also seen a sharp decline in available tech jobs over the past three months. A little over year ago 100 - 120 job listings were added to CrunchBoard each month. The number of new listings gradually declined with the onset of the recession and then fell significantly in November 2008, dropping from 68 to 37 listings from the month before. The listings rose slightly over the next few months, with February’s listings hovering around 60. Even though CrunchBoard’s listings don’t meet the magnitude of Dice’s or Monster’s listings database, this decline in available tech jobs is alarming.

It’s still not clear if the worst is over when it comes to layoffs and available jobs. Tech companies are continuing to shed jobs and even those companies which appeared to be immune to massive layoffs a few months ago, like Google, have succumbed to letting people go in the wake of the recession. There’s no doubt that the tech industry has been hit hard across the board. But the tech sector survived through the burst of the bubble a while back, and has proven to be resilient even in the most challenging of times.

This is a good article. Unfortunately, most people just don’t get it.

Don’t pretend we didn’t see this coming for a long, long time.

In the early 1980s, around the time Ronald Reagan became President and Wall Street’s great modern bull market began, we started gambling (and winning!) and thinking magically. From 1980 to 2007, the median price of a new American home quadrupled. The Dow Jones industrial average climbed from 803 in the summer of 1982 to 14,165 in the fall of 2007. From the beginning of the ’80s through 2007, the share of disposable income that each household spent servicing its mortgage and consumer debt increased 35%. Back in 1982, the average household saved 11% of its disposable income. By 2007 that number was less than 1%.

The same zeitgeist made gambling ubiquitous: until the late ’80s, only Nevada and New Jersey had casinos, but now 12 states do, and 48 have some form of legalized betting. It’s as if we decided that Mardi Gras and Christmas are so much fun, we ought to make them a year-round way of life. And we started living large literally as well as figuratively. From the beginning to the end of the long boom, the size of the average new house increased by about half. Meanwhile, the average American gained about a pound a year, so that an adult of a given age is now at least 20 lb. heavier than someone the same age back then. In the late ’70s, 15% of Americans were obese; now a third are.

We saw what was happening for years, for decades, but we ignored it or shrugged it off, preferring to imagine that we weren’t really headed over the falls. The U.S. auto industry has been in deep trouble for more than a quarter-century. The median household income has been steadily declining this century … but, but, but our houses and our 401(k)s were ballooning in value, right? Even smart, proudly rational people engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the new power of the Internet and its New Economy would miraculously make everything copacetic again. We all clapped our hands and believed in fairies.

The popular culture tried to warn us. For 20 years, we’ve had Homer Simpson’s spot-on caricature of the quintessential American: childish, irresponsible, willfully oblivious, fat and happy. And more recently we winced at the ultra-Homerized former earthlings of WALL•E.

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Interesting - of note:

1.) Phil Gramm (big shock)
8.) Bernard Madoff
9.) Dick Fuld
13.) Sandy Weill
15.) George W. Bush
17.) Alan Greenspan
23.) Bill Clinton

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