Rag Hand

The “downturn” is worse than expected by anyone except the full time members of the doom and gloom crowd.
Foreclosures are up, credit is down and unemployment is rising at an unprecedented rate.

What’s the good news you ask? Well it seems that the worlds biggest law firms are laying off lawyers by the hundreds.

Latham & Watkins is laying off 190 lawyers and 250 paralegal and support staff. This is out of some 2000 lawyers they employ world wide.

Holland & Knight laid off 243, Bryan Cave laid off 134 and Dechert was forced to let 29 go.

While I honestly don’t like the thought of anybody losing their job, in a sue happy world where lawyers twist the rules in favor of huge companies and the little guy generally get screwed, as long as it had to happen to somebody, I’m glad it’s happening to them.

Laura Krottner has started a class-action suit against Starbucks after a laptop containing the personal information of 97,000 employees was stolen. —In 2006 the company lost a pair of laptops containing the names and social security numbers of 60,00 employees. –You can read the complaint here.

While there appears to be no damage done that can be irrefutably linked to this latest data breach, the plaintiffs are hoping that the courts in Washington state will be more concerned about personal privacy than they are in many other states. For instance the courts in Arkansas and Indiana have rejected similar claims.

It seems quite clear to me that given the complete lack of improvement in security since the ’06 breach, Starbucks -like so many companies and even our own government- could care less about what happens to an individual’s personal data. –It’s also clear, that aside from a little bad publicity, there is no penalty for giving the bad guys all the information they will ever need to steal our identities and ruin our lives.

In a similar but much larger case the VA settled a suit over it’s loss of millions of files, but the payback for veterans will be from $75 to a maximum of $1500 and then only if they can show proof their identity was stolen and there was financial damage as a result.

The few rules that are in place are there to protect banks, businesses and the government. Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is that the guy on the street is just not rich enough to buy the number of politicians required to force a change.

The Irish are protesting in Dublin over the government’s handling of the economy.

Police said 100,000 people were on the streets, while organizers said they expected 200,000 to protest in total. Any way you look at it that’s a lot of pissed off people. The primary cause seems to be a “pension levy” that will cost public sector workers between 1500 and 2800 euros per year. In other words they will be expected to contribute to their pension funds.

Dublin was a leading tech center for a number of years with a huge building boom, then the jobs started going to Poland where labor was cheaper. Now those jobs have gone to places like Czechoslovakia and even Italy. (Which makes me wonder how many jobs the government tax breaks to businesses will bring back to the states.)

The country officially fell into recession in September 2008, and unemployment has risen sharply in the following months.

The numbers of people claiming unemployment benefit in the Irish Republic rose to 326,000 in January, the highest monthly level since records began in 1967.

At least they still have a government to protest. Iceland, once the fastest growing economy in Europe, crashed so hard that the ruling party had to fold tents. As did the ruling coalition in Latvia.

In order to boost productivity the French have officially stopped the 35 hr Work week and instituted a 40 hr week. –This has led to riots throughout the country. (Although I have trouble remembering a time when some segment of the French population wasn’t rioting.)

The Germans are drafting a plan to “temporarily” nationalize banks in that country.

In the mean time the UK, the Irish Republic and some other governments have already fully or partly-nationalized troubled banks to support their financial systems.

People seem to be hoping for the best and expecting miracles, but experience and observation tell me that the very rich and even the individuals who are directly responsible for this quagmire we’re in will survive quite nicely. But speaking as one of the little people, I’m starting to feel like a rodeo clown facing a mad Bull with no fence to climb and no barrel to hide in.

Let’s just hope we don’t wind up living in a totally socialist country. That system has failed miserably in other places so I don’t expect it to work here.

Bill Clinton recently said that this current financial mess never would have happened if he was in office. –Every politician says that everything bad was somebody else’s fault.

Strange. Isn’t he the one that signed the bill that to a great degree deregulated the financial markets and banks in particular.

With the removal of the safety mechanisms that had been in place since the last depression the financial institutions were free to invent any number of new sources of revenue. And the derivatives market was the goose that laid the golden egg for companies like Bear Sterns, unfortunately it relied on heavily on mortgages that people couldn’t afford.

The sub-prime mortgage market was by very definition unsustainable. In order for it to work the price of housing would have to continue to rise forever with home owners selling their houses and buying new property before they were forced to try and deal with the interest plus principle that they could never have afforded. –Now they refer to those as toxic assets.

Somebody should tell the ex-president that if he hadn’t signed a bill designed by and for the bankers we couldn’t have gotten ourselves into this mess.

The new stimulus package includes a buy American clause with a World Trade Organization proviso.

I’m amazed at the number of people who object to trying to bring back American industry. Yes it’s often cheaper to buy from a foreign country. But the only reason I can see for objection comes from businesses with foreign investment or Walmart shoppers.

A huge percentage of our overseas trade is already being usurped by countries like China. So why not at least try and protect our heavy industries.

It seems to me that the only way our country is going to get out of the mess we are in now is to generate jobs here at home. F*** the threat of retaliation by other countries. We remain one of the biggest consumer markets in the world and if we suffer they suffer.

If we have no industry it doesn’t matter how open other borders are to trade.

It’s time to protect our own and we can’t do that by pandering to the wishes of other governments.