Is This Really A Recovery?Written by John Finger
Money Matters January 2004 Is This Really A Recovery? Presented by The Money Management Firm, Inc. www.moneymanagementfirm.com EBay I.D. optionsforyou ______________________________________________________________________Bill Gates and General Motors Bill Gates is hanging out with chairman of General Motors."If automotive technology had kept pace with computer technology over past few decades," boasts Gates, "you would now be driving a V-32 instead of a V-8, and it would have a top speed of 10,000 miles per hour. Or, you could have an economy car that weighs 30 pounds and gets a thousand miles to a gallon of gas. In either case, sticker price of a new car would be less than $50." "Sure," says GM chairman. "But would you really want to drive a car that crashes four times a day?" ___________________________________________________________________________ Is This Really A Recovery? Since fall of 2003, we’ve received a mass of good news about economy. First-time jobless claims have fallen and are consistently below 400,000 per week threshold which is considered dividing line between an expanding and contracting labor market. Housing starts in 2003 were at 1.8 million, a level not seen since 1986. Worker productivity has increased substantially. The unemployment rate has dropped to 5.7%. The stock market was on a tear in 2003: S&P 500® gained 26%, while Nasdaq tacked on 50%. With all this good news, what’s problem? If you’re one of 2.7 million people who lost his job over past three years, you’re not seeing benefit of this recovery. The Labor Department released a very disappointing jobs picture for December, noting that economy created only 1,000 net jobs that month. Economists had anticipated a jobs increase of 150,000. My guess is that most of those 1,000 jobs went to economists: they, along with meteorologists, are professions where people make six figures a year for being wrong all time. But that’s a story for another newsletter. During final 5 months of 2003, according to Stephen Roach, only 278,000 jobs were added by non-farm businesses. That may sound okay, but nearly all of jobs came in three areas: temporary staffing, education, and healthcare. Temporary staffing is comprised mainly of low-paying jobs, while education and healthcare are shielded from foreign competition. Speaking of foreign competition, globalization has resulted in U.S. companies shipping many hundreds of thousands of jobs overseas to cheap labor markets like India and China. At first, bleeding was no big deal: most of shipped jobs were sweatshop jobs. But now shipment is getting more serious, involving not only manufacturing but also services. A company can hire six Indian engineers for price of one American one, and company need not worry about skyrocketing health care costs or other benefits. Indian workers don’t demand same kind of benefits as their U.S. counterparts.
| | The Student Who Knew Too MuchWritten by Sue and Chuck DeFiore
This article is for those of you who coach or mentor. Does this sound familiar?“Can’t I just try to mail or email, do I really have to call” “I was thinking I could wait to get business cards” “I wanted to be successful first, before I start to market or network” “Why do I have to do it that way, I thought I could do it this way” I could go on, but I think you get picture. I am always amazed by students who pay us for coaching and then question every thing we tell them to do. The business card one was kicker. I had just spent 20 minutes telling them how important business cards were, how and who to give them to, and then they had audacity to tell me that they wanted to wait. So you say, what do you do. Well, I tell them you paid me to coach you. You said you wanted my expertise, you wanted to be successful, you wanted to make money. However, in order to do that you need to get cards made up and you need to network, and market. You will need to use telephone and other forms of marketing outlined in manual. However, remember this is YOUR BUSINESS. If you choose not to follow methods I have outlined, then don’t expect to succeed during time frame we initially discussed. When your business doesn’t take off, and you don’t get referrals; which in effect, cuts down on number of deals (transactions, sales, etc. fill in blank here depending upon type of coaching you are doing) don’t ask me why you didn’t succeed, because I will tell you “I told you so”.
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