Bankruptcy!

Bankruptcy is like beginning a whole new game of Monopoly but with slightly different rules.  The I-O-U's get thrown out and the "Get out of Jail Free" cards are dispersed with a great hope that the game can begin anew!  Individual people do this all of the time.  It was our solution to over crowded jails due to debtor's prisons.  It has been the answer to overwhelming medical expenses and other unforeseen events and just careless spending above our means.  Now it is the wave of the future for entire cities!  Stockton, San Bernadina and a third city in California have recently filed for bankruptcy and there have been other cities in the United States doing the same.  California itself, the entire State could be headed that way!
   Why are they doing this?  and what does it mean?
   Simply, there is not enough money on the board.  Money needs to circulate for the system to work.  As you "Pass GO" you collect and land on certain properties, you pay.  If you can't pay, they cannot collect and the game is over.  The money is still there.  The fat cats have it or the bankers have it but it is not being circulated.  You bought Park Place for every single piece of value you could scrounge only to discover it was not worth so much!  So you begin to skip some payments.  Then the banks don't get it, the grocery stores don't get it, the worker at McDonald's doesn't even get it and soon the game is over.
   What makes the situation a little worse is past games.  In past games the winners were awarded with a kind of annuity, a lifetime income for a game well played.  Not everyone got this, just the winners, but they did pretty well, receiving lifetime payments as much as their yearly salaries while they worked and lifetime health insurance for a game well played!  This debt to past players (the winners only!) amounts to Trillions of dollars and with no money circulating on the board, it is difficult to come up with.
    This means that school teachers, city and government workers, policemen and firemen and others thinking they had won the system and could live out their retirement years with a good pension and benefits have all of a sudden found themselves with nothing!  Bankruptcy.  No more checks.  This initially solves the problem for the City, the debt has been wiped clean but it has taken even MORE money OFF THE TABLE!  This is how Greece is attempting to play this game and it has not worked well for them.  California cities and others are following failed states in a feeble attempt to play this game.
    There is another solution but it would require all of the players to agree and to put forth the best interests of the Nation as a whole and not individual players.  We could create more jobs!!!  The world is in such a dismal economic turmoil that people, corporations and countries will loan us money at NO INTEREST!!!!
because America is still the safest place to bank.  Now would be a perfect time to rebuild our infrastructure, our waterways and highways, our bridges and airwaves, our transportation and airports.  We used to devote 7% of our GPD towards this rebuilding and now it is less than 2%.  More jobs is more money in circulation, more for everyone.
    If we do not do this now maybe we should be thinking of a different game to play?  Maybe "Prison Dodge Ball"?

Wait and See What Happens...

...I do it too!  In the old days I was far more of a risk taker.  I ordered way more steel than I needed for a particular job, nice to have the inventory, convenient and I knew I could sell it.  I used to have a "cash flow",
completed jobs awaiting payment, jobs in progress needing to be finished, and jobs "on the books", guaranteed jobs to do down the line.  Those days are gone and I don't know whether they will ever return?
   I have become a part of the problem.  I am far more conservative now with the little money I have, careful where I might spend it, knowing more will be hard to come by.  This is rapidly becoming the new American standard and it is hurting our economy.
   Business has developed this same attitude, hanging on to their money, creating less production, hireing less, making less, laying off workers.  It is not the burden of being in business, it is not the taxes or insurance, none of those expences.  There are no customers.
   Cheaper doesn't seem to work.  Walmart has lost customers too.  It used to be that a business could create something better, invent something new or make it less expensive and they would succeed.  That doesn't work anymore.  You just can't create a job for a product that no one wants or can't afford.
Different businesses have tried everything.  "Free" this and free that with a purchase, time plans.  Heck, I have even seen beds you can buy over a four year payment plan!
   The working poor have become the new poverty statistics!  That is 25% of us!  Add to that the 14 Million people who aren't working at all and you have a recipe for disaster.
  It is funny when I hear different politicians come up with a solution for this.  You can't get blood out of a turnip.  You can't tax the poor any more.  No one played Monopoly as a kid?  It doesn't get better by reducing the flow of money.  We are waiting "to pass Go" and collect our $200!  Just something so we can keep playing!
   There are lots of ways to save money, to reduce our National Debt if that is really the issue.  Quit being the world's policeman would help or send someone a bill for the services.
   I liked playing "Monopoly" as a kid, liked the element of chance and got pretty good at it as I came to know the rules.  It was an American game and I liked that too.  If you worked hard and made good investments, knew the rules and played fair you might even win.  Always a chance.  Opportuntiy.  And risk, you never wanted to lose what you acquired.  Sometimes that would make very conservative players out of the most obnoxious kids.
   It was just a game invented from the last great depression, another time of grief and failure.  The "American
Dream" the game was based on is dissappearing.  Good jobs and home ownership is rapidly dwindling, the things that give us reason to be conservative.
   It was always the loser that tipped the board over in his own disgust.  Having lost everything, there was nothing left to lose.
   That is what makes riots in the street.  Nothing left to lose.

You can always find me HERE

Wow, that was lucky!

I would attribute a lot of my life to the luck of the draw.  That and along the way I have learned to take a flashlight with me.

   My first bit of luck was that my parents weren't from Somalia and left me to fend for myself in the dessert.

I was born in a wood framed hospital in a small town of 46,000 people in America, in Oregon, about as far West as one can go without leaving the mainland.

    There were no gangs in my town unless you count my best friend.  The two of us hung out together, rode our bicycles everywhere and walked along the creek back into the hills.  The creek that goes through this whole town.  I never knew violence or fear.  Experiences that I have never had.

   I grew up in a small college town, that was the main industry and like growing up in a Mill town where you would be expected to eventually work that job, it was just expected that I would go to college.  Lucky that too!

   The '60's and Vietnam, the Cold War with Russia, the ever increasing mega bombs, the creation of the Hippies, abstract art and beat poetry changed everything forever.  50,000 Americans and God knows how many Vietnamese died in that war.  It was on television every night.  We could eat TV dinners and watch the evening news!  Lucky there too, I never went but a lot of my friends did and some never came home.

   It was during this time that I realized the Human Race has a propensity for insanity.  Difficult to believe it now but there were protests.  Some people were actually for this war!

   Sometimes it is just lucky that History doesn't take a certain course, a road we are definitely on somehow gets disrupted.

   I grew up and raised my family under different times, better times than now.  You can't choose when you are born that was luck too.  Jobs were easier to get and there were always raises or different jobs.  Better jobs.  Almost anybody could buy a house and they cost about 25% of your wages.  The better job one had the bigger house you could get.  And you could always "trade up", build up equity in your house and trade that for the house of your dreams.

   Times are changing now, quickly and everything is slower too.  Reminds me of the saying, "if I didn't have bad luck, I wouldn't have any luck at all"!

   I think we are in for hard times and I think they will be with us for awhile, maybe for a very long time.

A part of it we can blame on others.  Somebody should have done something different.  Congress won't cooperate and you may not like our President.  It is always easiest to put the blame on someone else.  Some of it might be bad luck or no luck at all.

   And some of it is clearly our own fault.

   In the 1970's I could build a "ding bat house", a small house, maybe 1200 sq. feet with a simple roof line and nothing too fancy in ten days.  That was it, from building permit to turning over the keys, ten days, two weeks.  It cost the new homeowner about 25% of his wages and he had to put in his own landscaping, plant his own trees and put in the lawn, build his own fence and make it a home.

   We want more and we want it now.  These kind of houses are no longer being built because they wouldn't sell.  We want granite counter tops and the latest in kitchen engineering, the fence already built and underground sprinklers installed.  We want the big flat screened TV. And the double car garage for our new cars.

   It takes two incomes now to buy a house and what was once a haven to come home to has become an albatross.  We have become slaves.  Slaves to our desires.

   It is like the game "Monopoly," I have said that before.  When the bank runs out of money or one player has it all the game is over.

   Sometimes I feel that with our present political situation, all the disagreements and infighting, we might be playing a game of Chess?  Stalemate!

STEEL SINKS!

My $5,000 "Retirement Fund" in Steel Stock is now worth less than $3,000.  The Stock Market "Crashed" yesterday and is nose diving again today and I wonder what all this means?  Where is the $2,000 that I lost?

I wonder who got that?  I wonder how hard they had to work to get it?

   The Stock Market "Lost" over a Trillion dollars yesterday.  One day.  I wonder where it went?

   What was supposed to happen with our credit down grade is money should be harder to get.  A little higher interest and money would become scarce.  No one would loan us any.   In theory that should make existing investments more secure, old money better than new money.

   That is not what happened.  The Bond Market (people loaning us money) went nuts!  Lots of money entered the Bond Market and Stocks plummeted.  Now, what the hell could this mean?

   Bonds are often "long term investments", meaning over five years, often ten.  I remember buying them in grade school, a left over from WWII.  We would buy them at .25 cents a week and $17 dollars would buy you a Bond with a face value of $25 dollars ten or so years later.  Yes, Bonds are loans and they are based on faith.  In ten years things will get better.

   Stocks have become a "right now" investment, more closer to gambling than investing.  With computer generated buying and selling and day trading lots of money changes hands hourly and a great deal of money is lost or won in an hour.  Today the economy is in the tank and stocks are more like lottery tickets, pretty unusual if you should win.

   Nothing is related to any of this.  In the last three years Schnitzer stock has seen a high of $117 and a low of $23 and sits at $40 now, going down still.  The price of steel keeps climbing, always inching upward and never in retreat.  Buying steel stock in not the same as buying steel.

   America should have a quadruple AAAA+ credit rating, no, not because our industry is so great and not because of our banking system.  We need to improve those.  We should have the highest credit rating simply because we are the only "dream on the table".  In this game of Monopoly it is our best card to play.  The world knows this even if we have lost that card in the shuffle.  They still want to loan us money.

   I will keep my steel stock.  I like telling people that "I own Schnitzer Steel".  I think my little ownership of the corporate world gives me license to be critical of it.  And voting gives me the right to be critical of my own country and our complaining bickering political system that drove us into this mess.

   There is no second choice, no one else at bat, no other political system, no other country, no other economy.  Now is not the time to fold 'em, not yet time to count your cards.  We are the only game in town.

My garden and art stuff is HERE

Monopoly Money

Monopoly is a great board game, fun for the whole family!  It was invented during the Great Depression, in the 1930's when the entire country ran out of money and no one had work. It might be time to go into the attic and dust it off and start playing the game again!  The game begins with each player having an equal amount of money and the bank has a lot.  You play until you run out of money or, in some cases, the bank runs out of money.  Then the game is over!  It is a game of skill and luck.
     This game can go on for hours, in fact I have played a single game over a three day period! It continues as long as money remains in circulation and each player has some property, some method of earning more money.  When one player has lost his property or when the property wealthy players lose their money then the game is over quickly.
     This is all related to art because I make my living as an artist, selling my wares to people who have money.  No, I don't sell to the "super-rich", I have never met them.  I sell mostly to the upper middle class, those with good jobs, good benefits and yes, even those with good pensions!  I admit it, I am worried about the economy because I need these people!  They are my customers!
    It is not "Boardwalk" and "Park Place" that is being removed from our economy.  I think you could probably still play "Monopoly" without these two positions.  It is the railroads and utilities that are being taken away.  For now, anyway, but they will be coming for the others!  We have changed the rules and it is now a bit more like "Domino's"!  or that children's song, what is it?  "Pansie, Pansie, all fall down"!
    Destroying the middle class, attempting some kind of equality by pulling down those just ahead of us in this rat race will not be good for me.  I doubt that it will be a good thing for anyone.  These are the people that continue the money in circulation, the people who buy new cars, keep the stores afloat, people that buy my art.
    Monopoly doesn't work when the Bank has all the money either.  When the player's have none the game is over.
This is what I do.