Long Story, Mostly uninteresting but I though that I would take the time to explain why I am more uneasy than usual about the current state of affairs.
So, I have some friends/long-term acquaintances in New York City who I have been dealing with for years. The company I worked for back in 1999 went through some self-inflicted hard times back in 1999 during the tech boom and these folks bought the company, adopted me, and I helped them get the product line moved back to New York. During this first dealing with the boys from New York came the tech-market crash.
Went to work for myself after I finished the move for them, built a company and sold same. I was working for the firm that bought the company and they were getting into some hard times. This was 2007. The boys from New York called me up and convinced me to go to work for them. OK sure, beats travelling. Moved over, started doing the work and bang came the 2007 crash, Lehman Brothers and all. The work lated about a year, then I said to hell with it and went looking for my current gig with the fedguv.
So two months ago, the Boys from New York called me and asked me to go to work for them again. I told them that I was keeping my day job but I would work for them on the side (Note my lack of blog posts and you can probably even figure out when I started). Anyway, list night I started thinking.
What if these guys are bellwethers for bad times?
Every time I go to work for them, the money moving around gets easier and easier. They really don't have a clue of what they are doing, but the money is there and they have to do something with it. So they bring yours truly in to flog the dead horse for them. They pay me until things get weird and then cut me loose.
OK, so this time the money is just gravy money to me, I have kept my day job and it doesn't look to be going anywhere, but the principle remains the same.
Hot money is going crazy right now. People are trying to park money anywhere to get a return. The crappy plans of the world get trotted out and dangled in front of hot money hoping for a nibble. The boys from New York may well be at the level of bottom-feeding which, when they start feeling they can get a share of the hot money, actually coincides with the level of oversold and stupid the market requires for a blowout.
None of this matters per se, I still have a garden to plant and have to wake up to go to work every day. But if the market goes South again in the next six months, I will be amused to know that I may have a candidate for a signal.
1 comment:
Working in large (or largish) construction, hot money is what we tend to live off, or sometimes the second or third (taxes) derivative of hot money.
Your friends may be a bellweather, but I have learned that the best calculus seems to be to take the absolute most logical timing of a collapse, and add about two years to it. Then add another couple of years while people deny we are in trouble.
Case in point: 2003: anyone with a brain could see that the housing market was all enthusiasm; Summer 2005 - peak of house building 2006: lenders (Countrywide in particular) start talking about buying up market share, 2008: Lehman and All that; 2009 we admit we have been in a downturn since the start of 2008.
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