Monday, January 04, 2010

And People Think I'm Pessimistic

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has an article in the UK Telegraph that makes me look like a naive optimist:
...Weak sovereigns will buckle. The shocker will be Japan, our Weimar-in-waiting.

...The European Central Bank will stick to its Wagnerian course, standing aloof as ugly loan books set off wave two of Europe's banking woes.

...Wage cuts will prove a self-defeating policy for Club Med, trapping them in textbook debt-deflation. The victims will start to notice this.

...In the end, the Euro's fate will be decided by strikes, street protest, and car bombs as the primacy of politics returns.

...America's economy – though sick – will shine within the even sicker OECD club.

The article concludes with this "green shoot":
By mid to late 2010, we will have lanced the biggest boils of the global system. Only then, amid fear and investor revulsion, will we touch bottom. That will be the buying opportunity of our lives.

Nice. I think he covers all 10 plagues except the lice.

In job-related news, I attended the first day of training for a job as a tax preparer. I'm finding not a lot has changed in the 20 years I've been away from it other than some of the details which are easy enough to look up. I'm still not clear on what the odds are that I will actually have a job at the end of all this, or what exactly that job will be (they employ a lot of sign-wavers...). but I do know they are non-zero and were made better by over half the people that registered for the class being no-shows. We're keeping all our fingers and toes crossed.

That's it for now. Expect things to be quieter than usual while I try to focus on faking my way into a job and we try to figure out how to make all this work with one vehicle. We can always get a second car if we have to, but I have really enjoyed only having to mess with one car for the last three years and don't want to go back to the whole two-car thing. The downside is that it makes for a logistic nightmare some days.

Well, I'm off.

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