Over the course of my first six decades of stumbling around and bumping into ideas, I came across a very important one in about 1986. Goes like this: In management, there’s a fine art to harmonizing with coming events and the future direction of life that’s often most easily achieved by consciously not making a decision.
How many times have you heard (or read in a management journal) about someone who gathered all the facts and then promptly made an early decision only to discover in no time, that events had changed such that what was once a well-framed decision turned out to be one of (XYZ Company’s) greatest blunders?
Yes, it’s a fine line between the abdication of responsibility and delayed decision-making BUT the older I get, the less hurry I’m in to make decisions since the closer we get to the future, the more we know about it and the event drivers that construct it. Not sure if this makes sense, but if you have enough coffee going, or one of those brownies left over from yesterday’s reports, give it time and it might sink in.
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Fast forward on an extremely clear-headed Friday to the email inbox and readers who are writing in — 75% agreeing that there was a noticeable dynamic ‘mood shift’ over the past week and 25% who insist the web bot project is the closest thing this side of Sedona to silicon woo-woo.
Not to abdicate an implied duty to proclaim whether the predictive linguistic project was ‘correct’ in its forecast, I’m sure that will become clear over the next couple of weeks. However, despite a few expected emails (“George, you’re a dishonest idiot! Admit it, the webbots were wrong!” and another saying “How many gullible people are there?”), this is one of those linguistic shifts which is analogous to the sinking of the Titanic; certain events have indeed occurred but since the band is still playing on, and as long as we’re still reshuffling the deck chairs, this is still an unsinkable ship, right?
Well, no.
The leading candidate for this period has always been that the Israeli strike on Iran would be coming in this period. While it’s not here yet, I’d remind long-term readers that in predictive language work it’s impossible to distinguish between an actual physical event and one that is simply bespoke in mass media such that the emotion ‘print-through’ from the future into the present would be described in the same way.
Yet right on schedule over the past week, the IAEA first announced a break-through deal with Iran to outsource certain aspects of their nuclear program and now we read that Iran ( which must have read my management notes on delaying decision-making) is slowly moving around to rejecting the key conditions. Tensions are building like crazy.
Naturally, the Big News in Israel this morning is slugged (an old newsroom term meaning ‘headlined or spiked’ ) with captions like “Report: Iran rejects nuclear deal” so Israel is quickly moving up to ‘get ‘er done’ -ready to launch status. I haven’t gone through a morning news cycle on the FTA satellites yet, but the world that “Tehran has rejected the proposal of the IAEA” is obviously getting traction.
There are profound implications of all this: If I were betting right now, I’d still expect this to be candidate #1 for filling in linguistic expectations over the next several weeks to November 5 – at which time we’d get a see-saw or shark’s-tooth form of headlines for a while (strike on, then strike off, back to strike on, yada, yada, yada) with the requisite ‘personal diplomacy’ where we ought to be treated to lots of presidential-level airplanes taking off and landing hither and yon, trying to stop what is feeling more and more like a showdown.
This has some huge trading implications, too: For one thing, any major ratcheting up toward Israel bombing the half-dozen known & suspected Iranian operations would cause a bifurcation in the global investment community: Some money would flee back into US dollars on a ‘safety play’ while some other wheel barrows full would flee away from the US Buck for exactly the opposite reason.
So my first point is: In three weeks will we all look back at the events this week as the starting point for a crisis which seems destined to bring China and Russia into the picture; a modern analog to the Cuban missile Crisis? The starting point from which tensions build may still very well work out to be the IAEA’s hopeful “We have a deal!” pronouncements of about a week back.
This story is amazingly complex – but the financial moving parts are clearly peeking from behind headlines. Take for example “Saudis to drop WTI as price benchmark for U.S. crude“. Related to death of the dollar meme and the Iran situation? Without a doubt, you betcha.
Just as near-certain is the role of Iran’s new oil bourse which was dedicated this past week; remember this is the kind of behavior that got Saddam Hussein eventually hung. But look at all the jobs he created for us in the process!
So, no, I’m not prepared to write off the linguistics outlook for the period as a ‘miss” just yet.
True, there has not been one singular event like a nuclear terrorist attack, but that was always an outlier. But, what was not is the present period of building tensions for another week (or slightly longer) and then a saw tooth set of brink-like headlines.
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There’s a second story that is also a candidate – the announcement of National Emergency of “swine” flu.
Remember that we had enough insight into this period that a couple of weeks ago I told you to start making lists of numeric addresses of all your favorite web sites (including UrbanSurvival and Peoplenomics.com) so that if anything happened to the internet’s name server system, you’d at least be able to hit a few key news web site and maybe get access to online financial services.
And then what happened? Out came the headlines “US government report recommends blocking popular websites during pandemic flu outbreak.”
For sure, some people are going to call that a ‘dumb luck’ call on my part, but it’s all part of a language turn. Seeing it coming I told you a week ago today:
‘Still, I’ve taken the unusual step of setting up a static IP address for this page ( http://72.52.163.140/week.htm – bookmark it) along with an SSL layer so access via https://72.52.163.140/ will be possible. Subscribers to my Peoplenomics.com newsletter will still be able to access via http://67.225.203.185/ and again, an SSL layer is provided. ”
Then there was the October 15th report (more than 2 weeks ago) where I asked readers to bookmark our IP numerically with the idea that:
“So go ahead, start bookmarking DNS servers or use a WHOIS lookup to find DNS’s in advance. I bet the big news organizations and federal agencies will come back first in the event of any such possibilities and wow – would that kill off a huge portion of the free speech ‘problem’ posed by the internet, eh? “
And here we are with those headlines foreshadowing restrictions on the ‘net.
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Ultimately. time is the great arbiter of how much we get right & how much is wrong. Way back on August 15th I wrote up a presentation on how the technology worked for the ‘web bot discussion group’ which had a Saturday lunch up in Tyler, Texas. At that time (slide #64) I said in part:
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Could be an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. That timing seems to be lining up.
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OR it could be when the flu pandemic really hits
No, I didn’t say the obvious: A little from choice #1 and a little from choice #2, but that’s where we seem to be.
So pardon me if – like Iran – I play the waiting game while events sort themselves out over the next week or two. But if they can do it, so can I. Say, you don’t hear some jets spooling up, do you? Listen closely. Real closely.
Personal Income Report
This may not seem even remotely connected with reality if you’ve lost a home or are forced by layoff conditions to adapt to living under an overpass, but here’s the latest report on Personal Incomes out today:
“Personal income decreased $0.1 billion, or less than 0.1 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) decreased $0.2 billion, or less than 0.1 percent, in September, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) decreased $47.2 billion, or 0.5 percent. In August, personal income increased $17.4 billion, or 0.1 percent, DPI increased $14.1 billion, or 0.1 percent, and PCE increased $139.8 billion, or 1.4 percent, based on revised estimates.
Real disposable income decreased 0.1 percent in September, compared with a decrease of 0.2 percent in August. Real PCE decreased 0.6 percent, in contrast to an increase of 1.0 percent.
Here’s why out need to get a job in government – revealed by today’s report:
“Personal current taxes increased $0.1 billion in September, compared with an increase of $3.3 billion in August. Disposable personal income (DPI) — personal income less personal current taxes — decreased $0.2 billion, or less than 0.1 percent, in September, in contrast to an increase of $14.1 billion, or 0.1 percent, in August. “
Here all this time, I thought I was the humorist. Check out this part:
“Personal saving — DPI less personal outlays — was $355.6 billion in September, compared with $307.0 billion in August. Personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income was 3.3 percent in September, compared with 2.8 percent in August.
Maybe they ‘roast-a-bowl” earlier in Washington on Fridays, or something…I just can’t think of another explanation.
Meantime, the advance Q3 GDP figures out Thursday resulted in a manic melt-up in the stock market which provided this key insight: People have incredibly short memories. Q3 was when cash for clunkers and home buyer incentives were flowing strong. It’s the period which I’ve filed under “Giving away debt to home and car buyers…”
So to summarize: Eventually everyone ends up working for government of some stripe, until finally we formalize the tax slaves as a class, which we are already, but the marketing hasn’t kicked in yet.
ECI
Supporting this seditious view is the Employment Cost Index which was up today as well:
“Compensation costs for civilian workers increased 0.4 percent, seasonally adjusted, for the 3-month period ending September 2009, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Both components of compensation–wages and salaries (which make up about 70 percent of compensation) and benefits (which make up the remaining 30 percent of compensation)– increased the same amount, 0.4 percent.”
I don’t need to remind you that America has 154 million workers but only 18.465 million are actually goods producers. That means for everyone one person who actually makes something we’ve got 8.3 people who are providing services, education, and government to them which seems like a screwy ratio, unless, of course, the agenda is to ship all manufacturing and goods producing to the cheapest possible country and then report “corporate profits” on the labor rate differentials and bid population against population…but that’s been the game since telecommunications got cheap enough to make it all work.
Shall we change topics? My blood pressure’s rising.
Headline Thinking
CNN sent out an email advisory this morning that the “White House says 650,000 jobs were created or saved by $150 billion stimulus funds.”
OMG here we go again: Am I the only human with a calculator able to think any more? That’s $230,769.23 per job created or saved.
What is in the water supply in Washington? Tell you what: I’m going to save 23-million jobs in the US for today and I’m going to do it for $$5.6-million dollars. Be looking for my bill.
Shake & Quake
A strong earthquake in Pakistan Thursday is worth nothing. But then again, even bigger was the quake in Japan this morning. That one was a largish 6.9 quake according to USGS.