Opinion on the Silver Lining to the Bank Bailout of the Stock Market

Yet more news about the stock market and the bailout, how it is affecting New York. A lot of people in the entertainment industry are excited about the possibilities of sitcoms based on Wall Street players. Many stockbrokers are incredible writers, and are excellent test-takers.

The banking "crisis" is leaving a few big players in the banking industry. The failure of Lehman Brothers is encouraging the status quo, and providing six months of unemployment insurance to help boost the local economy, as well as the arts and entertainment scene in metropolitan New York.

The ordinary worker is not going to be as upwardly mobile as had been previously hoped, so what else is new?, is what a lot of people are mumbling to themselves, although, other people are screaming about what a bunch of nonsense it all is, and who cares, and its just more hokum, it does not matter to us little people anyhow. New Yorkers are indeed openly opinionated, and are not apt to listen to this all. People in Lower Manhattan are a bit louder about the stock market than folks out on Long Island are, and will get emotional and roll their eyes about every mumble in Washington causing an upturn or a downturn in the New York Stock Exchange index. Not being as urban, or knowing as much about the market as these industrious individuals do, I sit and listen.

In other words, a lot of these workers are now able to live better than they were doing prior to their job loss, and will be doing so until April of 2009, by which time, most of these highly skilled workers will either have started their own business or will be working with another firm. Most of the lay-offs happened with workers who are basically management-level employees in the hierarchy.

This really is not a major issue for the proletariat, in fact, a lot of people who are watching the news are convinced that it is best to ignore the news. I spent hours at the laundromat and the deli watching people ignore the news broadcasts about the stock market completely. However, it is an issue for the people who worked on a part-time basis for these individuals, who were employed by Lehman Brothers, their support staff, and it is good to know that the market shake-up is something that is not going global, as a few nay-sayers might have hoped.

In other words, a lot of these workers are now able to live better than they were doing prior to their job loss, and will be doing so until April of 2009, by which time, most of these highly skilled workers will either have started their own business or will be working with another firm.

Today, on Z100, I heard the new WAMU (Washington Mutual) ad proclaiming that the bank would be better than ever, now that JP Morgan Chase is in charge.Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac seem to have bounced back.

I'm mentioning this, as this is the sort of stuff that a person like myself, working two jobs, and going to school part-time; or attending two college programs and going to work part-time, or working full time as support staff for a stockbroker or lawyer did not have the time to notice. I considered myself lucky to know the name of everyone in the office, how they liked their noon-time beverage, what their favorite sports were, and what market symbols their favorite companies had. Becoming an unemployed artist on a budget taught me to use my eyes and ears to search the world around me, rather than just using the typing television and the tube to count on for live feeds and broadcasts, which was a relief, as the Internet became increasingly clogged with information rapidly after 1997.

Bear with me while I sound off some of the expenditures of your average executive type living in Manhattan, working for a company such as Lehman Brothers.

Rent - $1500 - $2000 per month or more
Taxi - $20 per day (on average)
Car Parking - $20 per day or more
Hotel - $125 per night and up
Gopher Tips $10 per day or more
Coffee - $10 per day or more
Lunch - $10 - $50 per day or more
Health Club - $50 per month or more
Newspapers - $50 per month or more
Business Suit - $500 per month or more
Internet Service Subscriptions - $150 per month or more

All of these expenses can be completely wiped out given a six month layoff for a single employee, who can sublet their apartment to an entertainer, and go off to Florida for the winter, and save money for six months, while studying for the next gig. If I learned to adjust to $100 per week, I'm sure that living on $400 per week of unemployment, plus stock dividends should be a well-deserved vacation. Expenses like this are similar in places like Syracuse, Rochester, or Buffalo, New York, with less snow. Here are the expenses for six months:

Plane fare - $160 - $500 round trip
Rent - $2400 for six months office space in Florida, or a room (plus about $75 per month for business liability insurance for the office option)
Food - $10 per day for two buffet meals, plus a light snack, or $15 per day to prepare food yourself
Mail-Order Courses - $95 for a tax preparation program, $1000 for a certificate, $2000 for a mail-order paralegal program (including books)
Health Club - $25 - $50 per month
Business Certificate - $50 for name registration, $75 for county registration, about $150 for corporate registration
Business Mail Box - $10 - $30 per month
Voice Mail - $8.00 - $12.95 per month for personal usage
Clothing - $50 - $100 per month
Digital Camera - $30 - $159 per month (less if you sell your photos)
ID cards - $30 - $60 per month (more if you go out on a regular basis)
music downloads - $50 per month

Believe it or not, this price list sounds like a bargain to someone living in Manhattan, where a cigar-box sized room costs $150 - $200 per week to rent. Excuse me for sounding upbeat about this, however, letting some of these excellent, educated and intelligent workers out of downtown Manhattan, complete with six months of unemployment, in good health, might be exactly what we need to revitalize the economy. These are the workers with math skills, skills that American students need, skills that we are falling behind in comparison to students educated in nations other than the USA who are now entry-level workers. A lot of the younger, single workers, are in fact, celebrating the fact that the failure of Lehman Brothers is a release from the "toxic workplace" for at least a few months, complete with a check in the mail, prior to having to wait for a pension or the miracle of worker's compensation. Right now, there are more positions available for people with usable math skills in the finance industry than there are bodies to fill the seats, which is why we have more workers moving here from nations like India and China to fill the jobs. This is also part of why the customer service jobs moved overseas, as the new executives from India decided this would be.

We realize that we here in the United States of America need to wake up and face the music that we have to consume less of our planet's resources, and we are working on it. Re-tooling our equipment to create a more Eco-friendly and more sophisticated society is expensive. Thus, we need to keep the economy going, so that the average consumer is able to channel their gradually building anger over the fact that technologies with prototypes built in the 1960's and 1970's are still not on the market. This is why the automobile stocks are not doing well, basically, there are no new cars, Detroit keeps on turning out vehicles with slightly different bodies that have operating systems that are no better than the ones built forty or fifty years ago. These vehicles are made out of "plastic", I field complaints from the average person all the time about how fragile these automotive bodies are. People are also complaining, not about the high price of gasoline, about the lack of infrastructure for ethanol, the lack of support for Compressed Natural Gas vehicles, as well as about the difficulty of finding an electric car for purchase outside of Los Angeles. Consumers want the new vehicles with the new technologies, and will do strange things to manipulate market factors such that Detroit will either build new cars, or there will be a shake-up in the automotive industry that will be even more drastic than the one in the banking industry. True, a federal take-over of the automotive industry would help to finance the banking industry, and then, there would be a need to privatize the automotive industry after the takeover. The United States of America is already supporting the automotive industry, the "Big Three" of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler with their constant losses, and their inability to retool their vehicles to be geared towards economic and environmental factors. I've been to Delaware, to Maryland, to Washington, D.C., and have seen the quantities of hybrid and electric vehicles driven by the officials. Detroit is now limiting sales of the Crown Victoria and another model of Ford compressed natural gas vehicles to official police departments.

What local people are more concerned about is the difficulty in getting mass transit funded, the traffic crunch, the influx of people to the crowded metropolitan area, and the lack of news about the big disaster area called Detroit, where the American automobile industry is headquartered. Detroit has been a disaster area since before the garbage strikes back in the 1970's, and has been supported by the federal government since the 1980's.

Of course, not everyone is happy about losing their job. Some folks liked their work, and married couples with children who attend public schools who live in houses on family estates will not be saving any money, and cannot just move all their things into storage and go elsewhere for six months, or won't, due to family constraints. The New York City public schools are constantly in dire need of qualified professionals to work in their offices, the school budgets are always lacking something. Moreover, who other than a stockbroker knows the ins and outs of corporate hierarchy for something like corporate underwriting for their local private school, or the board of education's television station? There are lots of opportunities available for people who are ready to take advantage of the flux in the market that is attempting to embrace the new technologies that nobody is mass producing for us, yet.