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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mishedlo who wrote (22919)	2/4/2005 7:21:33 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 116555

mish, Re: The whole thing is a crock. Thanks for your excellent and succinct analysis. :) It really is a pity that we simply cannot trust the government at all any longer. ;(

To: mishedlo who wrote (22919)	2/5/2005 1:14:47 AM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

Give it your best shot, how many businesses are created or destroyed every year here in the US? Every month? How many people lose their job and how many are hired every month? If you knew these figures you wouldn't be so cynical about the measely numbers put out by the BLS. I can believe that number perhaps. Heck I will believe triple that but not 297,000 (because I refuse to count selling junk on Ebay, or fianancial planners with one client). I started both my businesses with just one client, how else do you start a biz? My brother-in-law said something similar to this to me the other day when we were talking about people creating their own jobs by starting their own businesses. He's been sort of forced to do that (an IT guy) and the first two years were rough. He started his own software company. He said he had a problem with the idea that if someone who had started a business made $.50 the government counted them as employed. I corrected him, someone can make less than nothing, have a loss and still be employed. There is a reason they call it a profit and loss statement. People with jobs don't suffer losses but plenty of startup businesses do, as do ones who have been successful for years. I told him he'd worked far too long for someone else, he'd never been introduced to a large room full of successful business people who almost all had run losses for several years before their businesses turned a profit. My own ran a loss for the first two years and in year three I made 100 grand working by myself in a borrowed basement with borrowed equipment. This was 25 years ago so that was a nice chunk of change for a girl who would have made $6/hour doing the same job working for someone else... even considering the first two years of losses. I never had a negative year after those two in that biz, but I had two negative years in the new biz I started three years ago even with all my years of experience in business. Even when you aren't making money, you are building up something of value when you run your own biz even if it fails. Most people don't see it this way, that's why the world is full of people who work for someone else and are subject to the whims of the market place for their skills. They can't handle the idea of loss, so they settle for lifetime earnings which are far below those of a self employed business owner doing the same activity. Construction is particularly glaring. I really doubt lots of new construction business were created in the last 6 nonths. I am also going to hazard a guess that not a lot of construction businesses went under in the last 6 months either. Ha! You should be married to my husband, then you'd know just how crazy construction has been. I haven't seen him in five years because construction, commercial construction, is off the charts around here (as well as residential which he doesn't do). Hospitals and colleges are expanding and renovating like crazy and every time he tells me that he's not going to be working nights and weekends anymore I roll my eyes because it's been like this for so long now we can't remember the good old days when he'd get laid off every winter for a month so we could go to a nice warm island for three weeks. Guys who used to work directly for him now have their own sub contracting companies. Yet supposedly we created 14,000 construction jobs ie. NEW BUSINESSES since August but in January 60,000 jobs died due to construction businesses going under. More than likely they really padded the construction jobs in the 6 months prior to that and are just now figuring out those jobs never existed. In a given month, the number of guys working under my husband will swell to 60 and shrink to 10, sometimes repeatedly and he is one of 13 foremen in a fairly small contracting firm who handle crews this way. The way construction firms operate now is almost with no regular fulltime permanent employees, everyone is hired and laid off as needed on a daily basis. In the dead of winter unless the weather is especially cooperative, anyone who doesn't have a long history with the company is laid off. The rest are wishing they were because they are outside working on a site with no roof and no walls. Business & Professional Services is interesting too. We supposedly created 83,000 jobs from August to December and destroyed 115,000 of them in January. Now perhaps they decided that all those people selling financial planning do not really hold a job. Then again if they did that, they probably should have killed 250,000 jobs. You have to understand its not the same jobs created and destroyed. People are born every year and every year a large number of people die, but not the same people. Same with business, would you say those people who comprise the "float" of the living never existed, that they represent a bogus statistic? When you mention business services you are talking about some of my best friends and former corporate clients here. They get laid off from some big cushy corporation and go out of their own doing the same thing as a freelancer, very frequently for the exact same corp they used to work for. Behind every "consultant" is some poor corporate refugee who wants back in the womb and they will close up that biz as soon as someone offers them a "real" job. I know, they instant message me during the day with these day dreams of going "back". Nobody ever told them back when they were ruining their health putting in 60 hour weeks thinking that the future was this great corner office with lots of perks that if you aren't the boss by 50 you are on the hit list to get downsized by a 24 year old version of your former self. I was warned this was the logical consequence of getting older and getting paid enough to have it show up as a line item. I never had any illusion there was any kind of security in a job.