If The Truth Fits

I just heard about a story that left me absolutely amazed at the lack of self-awareness that exsits within corporate America, and presumably around much of the rest of the world, as well.

The ‘Big Three’ car makers in America, Ford, Chrsyler, and General Motors, made their way to Washington D.C. with caps in hand today to request that the American taxpayer bailed them out to stop the auto industry in the U.S. from collapsing. I can’t find a figure anywhere saying how much they were asking for, but I’m willing to bet that it has a whole load of zeroes involved. I’m not specifically for or against this bailout, I’m not too aware of the issues involved or whether the companies involved are victims of the current economic climate or victims of their own stupidity. The bailout isn’t really what concerns me in this article, it’s how the CEOs of those three companies made their way to Washington.

Private jet.

Yes, the people who are desperate to have their industry saved by money for the American taxpayer each took a private jet took their meeting, a move that Gary Ackerman, a Democratic Representative from New York described as being like “seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious.” Do you think that when they were sitting in their leather chairs, 30,000 feet up in the sky, they wondered how their travel arrangements were going to look to the public? If they did, I wonder if it happened before or after the champagne was served.

CNN are estimating that the flights would have cost about $20,000 for each CEO, which in terms of the scale of money that they’re talking about isn’t really that much, and reps for the companies have said that the private jets are a matter of safety for their CEOs, but come one, if there’s ever a time when a bit of humility is important, its when you’re asking for a loan! Especially when the money for that loan comes from the people who have already bought your cars.

I’ve complained about the media focusing on the wrong things in the past, and I realise that this story isn’t one of the major issues facing the world today, no one is really surprised that fat cat executives live in the lap of luxury, but I think that a story like this highlights how out of touch these people are with the general public, and when you consider that they’re the CEOs of American car companies you’d have thought that their public personas would have been finely manicured to ensure that they appeared like ‘normal’ American people, even if they secretly dreamed of driving a BMW or Mercedes. Of course, the media is all over this, everyone’s talking about it, even Perez Hilton has managed to stop gossiping about celebs to gossip about CEOs, its the perfect story becuase it doesn’t appear that anyone really gets hurt, and everyone can have a good laugh about it.

But, actually, people do get hurt. Apparently, in 2006, the median salary for someone in the US was around $26,000, the estimated cost of the flight for one of the CEOs was $20,000, and that ignores the millions of dollars that it cost for the companies to buy the private jets. The cost for the CEO to fly in coach class was $288, or $857 if they went first class. Every time that CEO takes a flight instead of rubbing shoulders , it costs the same amount as paying an American to work for the majority of a year, so when they say that they’re trying to streamline their business, and that involves laying people off from their jobs, perhaps they should consider that by cutting back on their perks and rubbing shoulders with the proleteriat in first class that they might be able to stop someone from becoming just another statistic amongst the unemployed in America.

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When something as momentous as a black man becoming President, apparently knocking down many racial barriers in the US, and causing a lot of people in the world to stop hating America, it feels quite hard for me to start writing about something else. Talking about what Lindsay Lohan is doing now, or which star of The Hills hates another star of The Hills just doesn’t seem to hold as much historic weight as my last few posts. I guess I’m just going to have to accept that I can’t cover something groundbreaking every day… or can I?

The Dow Jones made its third-biggest ever points gain today, which I guess would be big news, but there seems to have been a story like that every day over the past few months. I guess I’m getting a bit cynical of this whole economic apocalypse, but it seems to be up and down every day to the point where the only point at which I’d be surprised was if a financial correspondent on TV opened a report by saying “nothin’ much doing on Wall Street today, no ones jumped out the window yet, and no ones having a shower with vintage Dom Perignon champagne… sigh… and now here’s Steve with the weather.”

Someone might, and I’d like to stress the might, and stress it again, might have cured HIV.

Specialists are cautiously appraising reports that a bone marrow transplant - with specially selected donor stem cells — appears to have cured a 42-year-old American man of HIV.

Some 20 months after the transplant, there is no sign of HIV in his system, according to Gero Hütter, M.D., and colleagues at the Charité-Medical University here.

“We waited every day for a bad reading,” Dr. Hütter told reporters this week, some eight months after he first reported the case, in February at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.

But so far, he and colleagues have been unable to find the virus in blood, bone marrow, lymph nodes, intestines, or brain, he said.

I can understand how Obamania has taken over the news somewhat over the past week, but how on earth has this story slipped under the radar? I hadn’t even heard about this until I went hunting for news on Google, and I’ve had the news on TV for about 3 hours today (I think that in that time they managed to discuss about five or six stories, but that’s another matter altogether). Added to my earlier caution, the doctors involved have warned that the patient had a rare strain of HIV, and that a bone marrow transplant is too dangerous and too expensive to be a routine treatment for HIV. Still, despite those caveats, that’s still a pretty amazing story.

Right, now I have found a story that truly deserves to follow-on from the momentous occasion that was the 2008 American election. Jennifer Aniston has finally broken her silence over the Brangelina affair in an interview with Vogue magazine, branding what Angelina did (breaking up Brad & Jen’s marriage) and “very uncool“. In turn, Brad Pitt has told Jen to ’shut it’. The whole affair appears to have made the internet explode. Isn’t it great to hear that even impossibly good looking people have problems to?

I’m very pleased to announce that the above picture is an original illustration by Pop Vulture’s very own Pascal, I think its fair to say that we’ve got more talent in the art department than in the blogging department, and hopefully Pascal will be providing more original illustrations in the future. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m being too modest, we’re both pretty awesome!

From what I understand, last week was one of the worst ever on Wall St, and the case was pretty similar all around the globe. Things were definitely all doom and gloom, I’m pretty sure Jim Cramer of Mad Money fame was recommending that people started to stockpile tinned goods to be used for when the economy went down the tank and we reverted to a bartering economy. Okay, that bit I made up, but I definitely saw an interview with him where he said that he imagined a time in the not so distant future when you’d go to the ATM and not be able to take money out. So, I guess he was talking about any city centre in Britain on a Saturday night then?

What a difference a weekend makes. Today, the Dow Jones posted its biggest one day points gain ever, a whopping 936 points, a percentage gain of 11% (the biggest since 1933) which put $1.2 trillion dollars of value back in the market, smashing the previous points gain records of 499 set back in 2000 when people thought that the internet was going to turn everyone into millionaires. Over here in Britain the mood is equally buoyant, we’ve passed our own bailout plan that amounts to around £50 billion pounds, and whilst the nationalization of banks (or much else, for that matter) is something that has never happened in my lifetime, and a lot of people aren’t too comfortable with that, there did seem to be an air of confidence on all the business reports that I saw today, and whilst I’m sure it isn’t plain sailing from here on out, there does seem to be some light at the end of the tunnel. Who knows though really, stocks seem to be bouncing up and down like a walrus doing a bungee jump at the moment. I don’t know why I picked a walrus for than an analogy, but you’ve got to admit, its a pretty funny mental image right?

So, providing we don’t see colossal drops again tomorrow, it might be okay to stop scouting out locations where you can bury all of your cash, and perhaps loosen the purse strings a little so that you don’t need to bulk buy everything (when am I ever going to use 20lb. of mayonnaise?). Oh, and in case you were worried about my finances, the pound got a little bit stronger against the dollar today (don’t worry, you guys didn’t get weaker, I think), so I won’t be having to survive on cheap cheesesteaks for the whole time when I’m Philadelphia!

The good news continued to roll in today, as the North Koreans decided to allow international inspectors into their nuclear facilities again after they started reassembling their reactors in mid-August after a spat with the US (they wouldn’t remove them from the list of terrorist states, which they have now done), so I guess maybe they aren’t intending to destroy us western capitalists after all.

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I’ve been really hoping all day that another big news story would come up so that I didn’t have to cover this, but since the only other story that I think is big enough to cover is Hurricane Ike doing his business in Texas, and I wrote about a hurricane related story a couple of weeks ago (and I don’t want to perpetuate the myth that us Brits are obsessed by the weather), I’m going to have to dive uncertainly int the mind-boggling world of international finance and the stock market.

Just so we’re clear, I’m not particularly knowledgeable with this stuff, the closest I get to being financially prudent is to get more than one quote when I’m renewing my car insurance, or drinking at home before a night out with my friends (its like my house is a bar, and its a place where everyone knows my name!), so take anything I say with a large pinch of salt. You know when someone plays that ‘hilarious’ prank of unscrewing the lid on a salt shaker so that when you use it the top falls off and you get a plate full of salt? Yeah, that should be a large enough pinch.

Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest investment bank in the world, went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy today “after trying to finance too many risky assets with too little capital.” In my head, that makes a lot of sense, there had been a lot of growth all over the world for years and years, and that growth meant that banks thought that they could invest in properties and give out loans that were pretty risky, but they’d probably be okay since the economy was booming, and hey, everyone was doing it, so why not? Oh, I think I might know (with plenty of hindsight), it turns out that economic booms don’t last forever, that’s why they’re called booms in the first place. You’d think that people that worked in the financial industry would realise that!

To be honest, the reason for my flippancy is because I simply do not understand the scale to which these companies are operating. Seriously, how on earth can anyone contemplate the amount of money that is involved in the banking industry? Apparently Lehman Brothers had $800 billion of subprime mortgages… $800 billion! To me, that isn’t some mortgages, that’s a country!

All I keep hearing about are these massive numbers, this bank is on the edge, that bank is collapsing, but it hasn’t effected me yet (as far as I can tell), its very hard for me to really relate to this crisis when my money is safe (probably), my house is safe (no mortgage), food seems more expensive but its not effecting me too much, and my car gets 50 miles to the gallon so my fuel costs haven’t rocketed up like they have for a lot of people. Actually, since I get paid in dollars, and the dollar has got a bit stronger compared to the pound in recent months, I’m actually getting paid more than I was at the start of the year. Crisis, what crisis?

Of course, I realise that there are a lot of people out there that aren’t in as fortunate of a situation as I am, a lot of people are losing their jobs (and struggling to find a new one), and a lot of people are losing their homes too, and it seems like no one really knows how bad the its going to get, or how long its going to go on for, or if there’s anything we can do to fix it.

Happy Monday everyone!