Record Year for Amazon?

How interesting. Retailers are talking about this being the biggest holiday season sales drop in forty years, down 4% from last year. At the same time, Amazon had the best year in their history.

Sure, books are going to be popular gift items when people are trying to spend less.

Maybe something else is happening too. Shopping online is catching on, demographics that had previously resisted are now comfortable with it.

Through The Coming Years

More Brand Nubian. Why don't these guys get recognized as the classic NYC rappers? They paved the way for so much that came after them, and still perform around town.

Poor Enforcement Costs Billions

Bernard Madoff stole $50 billion from investors through his crooked hedge fund. There are certainly more cases like this out there.

The Madoff scheme cost the government about $17 billion in lost taxes. The auto manufacturers are asking for $14 billion, and the government is still deliberating about how to pay it.

Maybe better enforcement of regulatory laws would actually be a good source of revenue for the government, in a time when we need all the cash we can get.

Economic predictions are fun.

I like annual predictions as a form of information modeling.


2009
Government spending will increase early 2009
Dollar will fall mid-2009
Oil will rise mid-2009
Home values will decrease throughout 2009

2010
Government spending will peak early 2010
Unemployment will bottom out early 2010
Internet technology/access will improve early 2010
Hiring will begin to increase late 2010
Stock market turbulence will continue throughout 2010

2011
Hiring will continue to rise in early 2011
Home values will begin to rise early 2011

We get down for ours, we get down no doubt.

Grand Puba, from Brand Nubian, has some great solo stuff. NYC has flows that people don't even know.


I Like It video:

Obama, Build More Bandwidth!

What a rare time this is in the history of our economy. The whole world is waiting to hear what one man has to say. Ten years ago, who would have thought that at the end of 2008, a black man named Barack Obama would have so much power over the planet's wealth?

So far I think the public has been pleasantly surprised at how well he's handling this economic crisis. He's surrounding himself with some serious people, and really sounds like he understands their advice. It's good to have a qualified president for a change.

Personally, I take it as a very positive sign that he's talking about investing in America's infrastructure. That's the best thing to do to create jobs, and we need a major upgrade anyhow.

One thing that we should consider is to increase our bandwidth infrastructure. The internet is becoming much more video oriented, and that uses a lot more bandwidth, but is going to revolutionize international commerce in the next ten years. Widespread access to high capacity, high speed internet connections is going to be a major advantage.

God Bless The Dead

Tupac gets respect too. Without him, would Biggie have sounded like that?

THE NBER has spoken.

It’s official, we are in a recession. And we have been since December 2007.

Most people think that a recession is two quarters of negative growth. In the United States, at least, that’s not technically true. We are in a recession when the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) says we are.

A nongovernmental, nonprofit research consortium, the NBER uses a broad set of indicators to measure the health of the national economy. Their website is a great resource, with links to the data sets they use.

http://www.nber.org/releases/