"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
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"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Monday, October 03, 2011

From the "Figure that out all by yourself, Einstein?" file
Posted by Jill | 6:31 AM
You don't have to be a genius to realize this:
The U.S. economy is limping along with the help of modest business investment in new equipment, some exports to parts of the world that are growing and the last few dollars from the government's 2009 stimulus spending program.

For the time being, it looks like American consumers are AWOL. And until they come back, don't expect to see any real recovery in economic growth and the job market. Consumer spending typically accounts for roughly 70 percent of the U.S. economy.

Fresh data from the government Friday confirmed that American consumers are tapped out. Consumer spending in dollar terms rose 0.2 percent in August. But those extra dollars went to cover higher prices for food and gasoline; when adjusted for inflation, spending was flat.

Wages, meanwhile, slipped 0.1 percent -- the first decline in nearly two years. To make up the difference, American households had to dip into savings: the savings rate in August fell to its lowest level since late 2009.

"What you're basically getting is a scene where consumers are losing momentum, they're losing momentum on income and as a result of that they're slowing down on spending," said Steven Ricchiuto, U.S. chief economist at Mizuho Securities in New York.
That spending slowdown has rippled through the economy, creating one of the biggest drags on an already weak recovery.

The part that the greedy didn't realize in their plans to take ALL of the wealth in this country, is that not even the most conspicuous consumers can keep an economy of this size going. They may be trying to push the middle class down into poverty and the poor into living on the streets, but if only 1% of the population has any money to spend, they're going to find that what they have isn't worth all that much.

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Tuesday, October 07, 2008

I hope we don't start seeing more of this
Posted by Jill | 6:31 AM
I react more strongly to stories like this than some people do, because of my first-hand experience in dealing with the aftermath of a murder by a man with financial problems. When John List killed his family in 1971, it was an unusual story. When a Bergen County man killed his two sons and himself in 2006, it was still unusual. I fear that as the American economy collapses, stories like this will become more prevalent:
An unemployed man with an advanced finance degree who was despondent over his own financial problems shot and killed his wife, three children, mother-in-law and then himself in an upscale home in a gated community, police said Monday.

Officers found the bodies Monday morning after the wife failed to show up at a neighbor's home to go to work, Deputy Chief Michel Moore said. The deaths occurred sometime after Saturday evening.

A handgun that had been bought Sept. 16 was found in the father's grasp, Moore said. Karthik Rajaram, 45, left two suicide notes — one for police and one for friends and relatives — and a will.

The notes attest to Rajaram's financial difficulties, and he takes responsibility for killing his family members, Moore said.

Officers found the mother-in-law, Indra Ramasesham, 69, dead in bed on the first floor. Upstairs, they found a 19-year-old son, Krishna Rajaram, dead in bed in the master bedroom.

The gunman's 39-year-old wife, Subasri, was found in another room, also apparently shot while sleeping, Moore said.

In an adjoining room, a 12-year-old son, Ganesha, was dead on the floor, and his 7-year-old brother, Arjuna, was dead in bed. Coroner's assistant chief Ed Winter said the victims were shot multiple times.

Rajaram had a master's of business administration in finance, formerly worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers and Sony Pictures, but had been unemployed for several months, Moore said.

Moore did not specify what financial trouble the man had been in. He noted that the family did not own the home.


We've built an entire society around consumerism. We've encouraged people to go into debt to buy more house than they need, more house than they can afford. Motor vehicle companies created leases so that people could drive more luxurious cars than they could afford otherwise. Suddenly everyone was entitled to the trappings of wealth -- the mansion and the luxury car and the 5-star Caribbean vacation every year. And now the rug has been pulled out from under us, and these people are left with nothing but debt and dashed dreams, in a country where the acquisition of STUFF is the only value.

What does it say about us that the thought of living with less is enough to make people suicidal?

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Sunday, January 06, 2008

Funny how the colors of the real world only seem real when you viddy them on a screen...
Posted by Jill | 10:03 PM
And so, after about four hours work by a very nice young gentleman in the employ of Dish Network, we have now joined the ranks of those with bigass TVs in their living rooms; those people whom you can see what they're watching as you drive by. As bigass TVs go, ours isn't all that bigass; it's a 40", but in a 15' x 15' room, it's plenty bigass.

Our living room has pretty much served as a giant entry foyer and cat lounge for the past ten years. For some reason, perhaps because we have a sizable basement, half of which is finished (if you can call cheap 1970's paneling with no insulation behind it and a Celotex ceiling with some tiles held up with duct tape after last spring's Great Squirrel Adventure "finished"), we decided when we moved in that the basement family room would be our primary TV location. The problem with this has been that because there's no insulation behind the cheapass paneling, you could cure bacon down there in the wintertime (which may make it the perfect yoga studio for middle-aged women, but hardly a cozy TV-watching room). So it means that we have been doing too much sitting on the bed watching TV in the evening, leaving the living room, with it's lovely Pottery Barn Malabar rattan sofa and chairs (never mind the red carpet that's still there from the previous owners; with a little work we've been able to achieve a kind of somewhat zany Moroccan paradise look), pretty much to the cats.

All that has changed now that we have the BATV in the living room, with the same hundreds of channels of nothing to watch that we had before, with some added hi-definition channels from VOOM TV that have opened up entirely new vistas of wasting time. Aside from making Mr. Brilliant's watching the Giants beat Tampa Bay today that much more pleasant, hi-def means that you'll watch just about anything with pretty colors, nice beaches, or interesting movement, which is how I, someone for whom spectator sports consists exclusively of baseball, figure skating, and maybe an occasional tennis match, found myself this evening unable to tear myself away from watching four French guys and two Brits doing parkour across Singapore. But now I'd better go to sleep, because I have to go to work tomorrow and a program on the culture and music of Mali is coming up on the Equator channel.

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Thursday, November 08, 2007

Gee, ya think?
Posted by Jill | 6:46 AM
This is about as close an admission as we're going to get that the so-called "strong economy" of the Bush years despite anemic at best job growth and stagnant wages was a function of homeowners using their bubble-inflated homes as a piggybank:

“Everybody was basically using their house as an A.T.M. machine,” said Dave Simonsen, a senior vice president for NAI Alliance, an industrial real estate firm in Reno. “Now they are upside down on their house without that piggy bank to go back to.”

From 2004 through 2006, Americans pulled about $840 billion a year out of residential real estate, via sales, home equity lines of credit and refinanced mortgages, according to data presented in an updated working paper by James Kennedy, an economist, and Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman. These so-called home equity withdrawals financed as much as $310 billion a year in personal consumption from 2004 to 2006, according to the data.

But in the first half of this year, equity withdrawals were down 15 percent nationally compared with the average for the last three years, and consumption supported by such funds plunged nearly one-fourth, according to the Kennedy and Greenspan data.

This summer, the size of withdrawals fell even more sharply to about one-third below the level of late last year, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

“This slide in equity withdrawal is very recent,” Mr. Zandi said, “so you wouldn’t expect the drop in spending to occur until now, or Christmas.”

Only a year ago, money taken out of houses was still more than 9 percent of the nation’s disposable income, Mr. Zandi calculated, using a sampling of Equifax credit reports to supplement Fed data. By this fall, it had dropped to about 5 percent, a difference of about $350 billion a year.

Much of the attention in the recent collapse of the housing boom has focused on those in danger of losing their home or facing higher monthly payments in their adjustable mortgages. But the broader effect on the economy is likely to come from the much larger group of homeowners who can no longer count on rising home values to bolster their wealth.


You know what? I have no sympathy for people who find themselves tapped out because they decided to blow their home equity on home theatres and in-ground pools and Ford Excursions and vacations in Tahiti. You don't have to be a genius to know that tapping equity for ephemera is really goddamn stupid. It's one thing to take an equity loan to remodel the kitchen, though I would say that the way things look now, those who spent $70,000 to put a gourmet kitchen with custom cabinets, tumbled marble floors, commercial appliances, and quartz countertops in a 1950's cape cod aren't going to see a return on that investment. But at least that's putting the money back into the asset. Tapping home equity for things that wear out within a few years or are gone within a few weeks is just plain stupid.

But it's hard to believe that retailers are going to enjoy the kind of holiday seasons they've had in recent years.

Mr. Brilliant and I have no equity loans and no credit card debt. And when we go out to buy our HDTV this season, we'll probably get a really good price. And if we buy it on a "no interest for eighteen months" plan, we won't be paying interest either, because it'll be paid in less time than that.

Sometimes deferred gratification has its advantages.

As long as Maggie's obsession with the walls in the basement doesn't mean there's mice behind them. That would mean basement remodeling. And then I won't be able to be so damn smug.

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Sunday, November 04, 2007

Pimp My Home Entertainment
Posted by Jill | 3:29 PM
Mr. Brilliant and I have decided that in an effort to Do Our Part to keep our nation's economy humming, we are going to succumb to the siren song of flat-screen, high-definition television. After all, we haven't purchased a television since around 1986, for all that we have three sets. One of them isn't used and was given to us by a friend who was moving, the other is Mr. Brilliant's father's old bigass RCA ProScan, and the third is the aforementioned 1986 purchase.

Now I have this peculiar quirk to my personality. I can change electrical outlets; install a Fluidmaster in a toilet, paint, and reface kitchen cabinets. But when it comes to electronics, I get so anxious that I have to leave the house. It doesn't matter what the electronics project is -- wireless networking, hooking up a DVD player, or installing a satellite dish. If it's electronics, just call me when it's over.

As a result, all this gobbledygook that accompanies specs for flat panel HDTV is giving me a headache and raising my blood pressure. So I'm going to open the floor to you, faithful readers, to suggest, based on your experience, a good one to buy. We've pretty much narrowed it down to a 36" or 42" LCD, because our living room is your standard 15-1/2 feet square 1950's POS cape living room, so a theatre-sized plasma set is ridiculous. We also don't want to spend more than $1500 tops; with a $1200 range preferable (because then we have to deal with having additional cable run, a new Dish Network receiver, and deciding whether to keep all three receivers or run the basement family room set off the living room HD receiver, if such a thing is possible).

So have at it, O Brilliant ones. What's your recommendation?

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