It’s the last day of the year and I have two retrospectives for you.

The first is Many Happier Returns from Business Week’s Marc Miller.

2009? No valentine—
The landscape looks like District 9,
Though corporate corpses line the lawns
Instead of otherworldly prawns.
Among the living, those once strong
Now huff and puff and wheeze along,
Unless, of course, they got a gift
When stimulus gave them a lift.
So many deemed too big to fail
And so few deemed too big to bail,
The situation gives one pause—
Who made Tim Geithner Santa Claus?
With federal spending out of sight,
Paul Krugman says it’s still too slight.
The controversy’s fierce, but wait,
There’s still the health-care-bill debate.
The public option’s blown a fuse,
The Senate bill will lose, win, lose,
They’ll never make Olympia Snowe see
Eye to eye with Ms. Pelosi,
Lieberman says no, yes, no,
While Harry Reid—oh, let it go.
A back-and-forth on cap-and-trade
Means going green’s again delayed,
And how can joy be unalloyed
With double-digit unemployed
And upward-sailing federal debt…
Did I say Merry Christmas yet?

Well, Merry Christmas anyhow,
And first of all, the deepest bow
To those whose companies survived,
And in some cases even thrived:
At Goldman Sachs, somehow Lloyd Blankfein
Kept the profits of his bank fine;
Richard Anderson impressed
With Delta’s merger with Northwest,
While Citi’s Pandit spread some cheer
By working for a buck a year,
As did the chief of Oracle—
What, Ellison? Historical!
Bob Iger helped make Disney shine
By snapping up the Marvel line
And also made his stock price spark
Announcing that new Shanghai park,
While Microsoft made big noise revvin’
Up to market Windows 7.
Signs of life were found, they say,
By analysts of M&A,
And Jeffrey Bewkes at last was able
To unwind Time Warner’s cable.
Wal-Mart bravely soldiered on
In price wars vs. Amazon,
But happiest of all, perhaps,
Was anyone who markets apps,
From recipes for turkey scraps
To farts to Chinese take-out maps.
Such downloads, though they may be pap, ‘ll
Surely warm the hearts at Apple.

Season’s greetings, too, to those
Whose bottom lines hit thudding lows,
Or who are never coming back:
An R.I.P. for Pontiac,
And even Saturn fell to earth
(I liked the Vue, for what it’s worth),
Though GM, in a bid to cope, ‘ll
Sell, keep, sell, keep, sell, keep Opel.
Massive debt at AMR,
Six Flags and Saks are under par,
And for the umpty-umth year, Boeing
Can’t get its Dreamliner going.
NBC is finding ten o’
Clock is not prime time for Leno.
(Will its programs be more trendy
Once it’s cut off from Vivendi?)
Intel’s having not much fun
In being sued by everyone,
While Rupert Murdoch feels the sting
Of Google (his solution: Bing).
The woe extends to Donald Trump,
Who’s suffering from a gambling slump,
And layoffs even ruled the day
(And this is rare) at J&J.
Some not-too-prudent marketing
Meant sales were down at Burger King,
And though their image is aglitter,
Are they in the black at Twitter?
Little changed at CIT:
It’s barely out of bankruptcy,
While profits were a constant lack
At Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Oh, one more thing that made us freak:
When Bloomberg purchased BusinessWeek.

So for next year, here’s what I’m thinking:
Let the trade gap go on shrinking,
Let each market force allow
A solidly five-digit Dow.
In fact, let every market fly—
The DAX, the Nikkei, heck, Dubai.
Let the feds still run GM,
But once it’s healthy, fire them.
More electric cars, and please,
More cost-efficient batteries.
Let the media brass divine
A way to make a buck online,
And let that buck not plunge so low
The U.S. ends up with no dough.
Let a sluggish SEC
Resolve its Madoff misery,
And let the BLS report
Statistics of a happier sort,
With millions of well-paid new jobs,
For everyone, not just Lou Dobbs.
Let the housing market soar
Right back to where it was before,
And let consumer spending rise,
But don’t let debt metastasize.
Peace on earth, good will toward men,
And see you in 2010.

Next is an artful review of the year from the serious souls at JibJab—who never crack a smile because they’re too busy laughing.

Image credit: Business Week and JibJab

Your comments-priceless

Don’t miss a post! Subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

See all mY generation posts here.

Your comments-priceless

Don’t miss a post! Subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

See all mY generation posts here.

Your comments-priceless

Don’t miss a post! Subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Actions have consequences, mostly unintended.

Ready, fire, aim.

In response—mostly—to the financial crisis, the US government has taken so many actions that the list is almost too long to chronicle here. To pick a few…

• The government has picked survivors in the banking industry.
• The government has picked survivors in the auto industry.
• The government has picked executives in many companies.
• The government has set compensation levels in many industries.

And the government’s intrusion into previously private enterprise sectors has only just begun.

Of course private enterprise has never been a model of virtue and discretion. But, just because private enterprise has executed a series of excesses, is it reasonable to assume that federal regulation will produce unalloyed goodness?

If executives in private enterprise cannot foretell catastrophes ahead, is it reasonable to assume that those same executives, when working on behalf of the federal government, will have better foresight?

Massive Actions, Unintended Consequences

The economy is in uncharted territory. This is the first major crisis of the integrated, global economy. It simply has too many moving parts for any individual or organization to identify all the inter-relationships, much less to forecast the results of all those interconnections. The chart below makes the point exquisitely.

Historically the money supply has grown by 2-7% annually, with spikes prior to Y2K and following 9/11. In the past nine months, the Fed has increased the money supply by over 100%, almost ten times greater than the largest previous increase, during Y2K. The Fed might argue that this increase was needed to offset the loss of a comparable amount of bank lending, when credit dried up in the past year.

But how and when does the Fed unwind this massive increase? What are the long-range consequences of this action?

At the moment, no one can guess. However, we can be certain that many of the consequences will be significant, unforeseen, and unintended.

Transparency – The Only Cure for Unintended Consequences.

The Federal government now controls almost 25% of all domestic economic activity, not to mention 100% of the money supply. We need much more transparency, particularly with government sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Recently our culture has cheapened transparency to the cliché “full disclosure…” after which the author lists some relationship, often trivial.

The US government pumped over $170 billion into AIG late last year, to prevent its collapse. This expense received very little exposure, either from the press or by the Treasury Dept. execs who made the “investment.” Where did this $170 billion go? Why was this expense necessary?

Neither elected congress people nor Presidential staff exhibited any curiosity or outrage over this “investment.” However, when AIG paid out $165 million in bonuses—only 1/1000 of the amount the Treasury Dept. had spent a few months earlier—elected officials went into hysterics. Selective transparency is no transparency at all.

“Sunshine is the Best Disinfectant.” –Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

Meaningful transparency can have considerable impact. Witness the recent publishing of the expense accounts of British Members of Parliament.

In the US, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) regulates campaign contributions. Of course every politician running for office has thoroughly computerized records of donors and amounts and the FEC requires that every candidate report all donations to the FEC. That information might be interesting to voters making voting decisions. But candidates provide those reports to the FEC in thick, printed volumes, specifically to delay the FEC in compiling the results. As a result the FEC finally publishes the donation reports months after the elections are done.

Follow the Money—Post Everything on the Internet

With the expansion of the government into finance, autos, energy, and insurance, as well as health care, public disclosure is critical if our economy is to respond positively. Encourage your elected representatives to post budgets, and expenses on the internet.

Over time, we can recapture our democracy.

Your comments-priceless

Don’t miss a post! Subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

See all mY generation posts here.

Your comments-priceless

Don’t miss a post! Subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

In December I wrote a short post on Siemens culture of corruption where bribes were a line item in the budget.

I was ticked off that CEO Klaus Kleinfeld denied doing anything wrong and then had a very soft landing as CEO of Alcoa Aluminum.

I got angrier after reading that “KPMG exposed to top management staff of Siemens in the fall of 2003, how £4.12m in cash was brought into Nigeria by the communication division… investigators stated in their court papers that the employees identified in the report, including a Communications Division manager, which was the division that conducted business with Nigeria, “continued to pay bribes through a series of slush funds until at least November 2006,” when they were arrested at a raid on the German offices of Siemens in Munich.”

Siemens paid a $1.6 billion fine—big deal.

I have no idea what the current Justice Department would do, but at that time “the Justice Department allowed Siemens to plead to accounting violations because it cooperated with the investigation and because pleading to bribery violations would have barred Siemens from bidding on government contracts in the United States. Siemens doesn’t dispute the government’s account of its actions.”

Siemens admits the bribery, but our government doesn’t want to prevent a corporation that cheated dozens of American companies out of hundreds of millions of dollars of possible business from being able to bid on US government contracts.

Why am I bringing this up again? Because now I am raging.

It’s all of 90 days later and I’ll give you three guesses as to who’s bidding on stimulus money contracts and the first two don’t count.

“George Nolen, CEO of Siemens Corp., the U.S. subsidiary of the German giant, aims to win $75 billion of Washington’s $787 billion stimulus package.”If you’re not prepared,” says Nolen, “you will not be able to take advantage.”"

Now, I know that Siemens does many things well, but I seriously doubt that they are the ‘only company in the world’ on anything.

I don’t have an MBA and I’m not a lawyer or a big time business person, so I would greatly appreciate it if one of you would explain why, at the very least, there couldn’t have been  a 12 month moratorium on their bidding for US business.

Image credit: flickr

Your comments-priceless

Don’t miss a post! Subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

See all mY generation posts here.

Your comments-priceless

Don’t miss a post! Subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

See all mY generation posts here.

Your comments-priceless

Don’t miss a post! Subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Now check out Dodd’s Wall Street results

Image credit: sxc.hu

Your comments-priceless

Don’t miss a post! Subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

See all mY generation posts here.

Your comments-priceless

Don’t miss a post! Subscribe via RSS or EMAIL