Is this the bottom?
Blogger Jeff Matthews suggests a way to tell when the market has hit absolute rock bottom:
It’s when everybody is too scared to buy—and we mean everybody, including smart-alack blog writers—that the opportunity has come.
But foreign markets suggest we may already have arrived.
Don Mecoy
Business Writer
Shortest post ever
This is the briefest statement ever from an economist.
Paul Krugman on his blog this morning.
Don Mecoy
Business Writer
Recession George?
Halfbakery suggests we should name recessions after people like we do hurricanes.
A recession is like a hurricane in many ways: It travels a deadly path from one financial sector to another, destroying all profits in its path and affecting the health and wealth of everyone remotely near to it financially.
This also reminds us that, like hurricanes, recessions do sweep through regularly.
Don Mecoy
Business Writer
Tech night out: market meltdown edition
I was on a mission Thursday night when I raced into the conference center at the Presbyterian Health Foundation Research Park. My editor wanted a “man-on-the-street” take on the ongoing market meltdown from the crowd of technology-based entrepreneurs.
What I found is that most of the start-ups working to commercialize a technology in Oklahoma haven’t been hit with a direct impact from the market crash.
That’s because they aren’t yet in a position to seek financing directly from lending institutions, which likely have made credit much more difficult to obtain.
“I think that’s evaporated,” said Tom Francis, vice president of investment funds at i2E, the not-for-profit corporation that mentors many of the state’s tech-based start-ups. “I think the start-up companies that were just sort of marginably bankable before, now are not. It just got tighter.”
But there’s an indirect impact, said David Thomison, i2E’s vice president for Enterprise Services.
”Many of our entrepreneurial companies rely on individual wealthy angels for start-up capital,” Thomison said. “The indirect end result of it, being the drop in the stock market, will potentially over the next 12 months have an impact on our clients’ ability to raise private capital.”
Despite the crushing financial news of the past week, the mood at the networking event was upbeat. There were knots of people gathered in small groups engaged in animated conversation throughout the conference center.
When I completed the man-on-the-street interviews, I got a few minutes to relax and meet some OCU students who are planning a major assault on the 2009 Donald W. Reynolds Governor’s Cup Collegiate Business Plan competition.
I’ll write in an upcoming edition of The Oklahoman about their ambitions and the wonderful fallout the past year’s Governor’s Cup brought them.
In the photo above, Scott Rollins, l
eft, and Richard Alvarez, right, both of Selexys Pharmaceuticals, share a conversation with Max Doleh of Productive Technologies.
Business Writer
Economic stimulus payment news
In today’s paper, I wrote a story about 69,000 Oklahomans who need to file a federal tax return this year to request an economic stimulus payment. Those Social Security and veterans’ benefits recipients typically haven’t needed to file a return because they don’t have enough income to trigger a tax liability. The IRS is trying to make sure those folks file by Oct. 15 to get their claim on the government money.
However, Oct. 15 also is the filing deadline for about 110,000 Oklahomans who received extensions to file their 2007 federal income tax returns. The agency isn’t as concerned about these taxpayers failing to file because they already have indicated their awareness of the need to file by obtaining an extension.
But the numbers of folks who haven’t yet received their stimulus checks does raise the question of whether we might see another small boost to the economy when these late filers receive their payments.
More information from the IRS here.
Don Mecoy
Business Writer
Absentee ballots are in the mail
Exactly one month before the Nov. 4 election, absentee ballots arrived in our mailbox Saturday.
Holding mine, the General Election instantly is very real. All the names are right there on the ballot for me to mark my choices with a No. 2 pencil, stuff it all in the provided envelope, get it notarized, apply 76 cents postage, and mail it to the Oklahoma County Election Board to arrive before the 7 p.m. deadline on Election Day.
I won’t be standing in long lines at my polling place, which seems to move each time Edmond gets bigger, debating my choices until I sign the big book, receive a ballot and rush through it. I did that in a high school election. A cheerleader won by 1 vote, mine. I had intended to vote for another.
This time, I can carefully review the document, gather answers to remaining questions, and reach informed personal decisions. I heard somewhere, “this is the most important election of our life time.” Gerald Ford said it in his day. Ronald Reagan said it. Bill Clinton did too. And George W. Bush’s election in 2004 also was the “most important.”
You may have forgotten you won’t be making a direct choice between McCain/Palin and Obama/Biden. Remember, it’s the Electoral College and you’ll be voting collectively for the Electors, 7 Republicans or 7 Democrats. Some names you will recognize, but not all, unless you’re really into politics.
With all this time to think about it, I can’t see any reason not to take great care with each mark with that No. 2 pencil. Today’s economic climate demands that. For Corporation Commission, what positions do the candidates hold? For Congressional officers, do you know how they’ve voted on key issues?
Those already in office recorded votes on the $700 billion bailout. They may have voted one way Monday and the opposite on Friday, in an effort to help Oklahomans. That was the same day Oklahoman Business Writer Don Mecoy wrote: “Oklahoma’s largest pension and endowment funds could lose up to $73.4 million on investments related to failed investment banking firm Lehman Brothers, the state treasurer’s office said Friday.”
This may or may not be the most important election, but it’s a good idea to treat it as though your wallet might depend upon it.
Assistant Business Editor Nancy Darnell
Cheap Gas? Fuel at $2.99 suddenly looks like bargain
The weekend began with a pleasant surprise for me when I saw signs advertising gas prices at $2.99 at local 7-Eleven stores.
Turns out, the news was even better.
I stopped at the Sam’s Club at Memorial Road and Pennsylvania on Friday evening and was able to fill up my car for $2.93, with a 5 cent per gallon discount I got with my Sam’s card. Shades of, what, 2007?
Then I drove over to Fort Smith to visit my parents, and when I fueled up again to return back to Oklahoma City, the price there was $3.15. Downer.
Not sure what fuel prices will be to start the week. I’ll look on my way to work today and report what I see.
UPDATE: My editor, Clytie Bunyan, reported that she filled up for $2.89 a gallon this weekend at a southside station. Fellow reporter Debbie Blossom said that a 7-Eleven at NW 10 and May Ave. was advertising gas prices at $2.89. Fill up and enjoy it while it lasts!
Business Writer
Folding money
Don’t have any idea what to do with your cash these days? You’re not alone. Economic turmoil and slumping markets have baffled even the most experienced of investors.
As the old saying goes, if you want to double your money in this market, fold it in half and stick it in your pocket. Or, like the artist at this site, fold your money in creative ways.
Don Mecoy
Business Writer
Nothing’s safer than money in the bank
I spoke to three bankers in the span of two days last week, and within the first 60 seconds of each conversation each of them made the same statement: “Nothing’s safer than money in the bank.”
Of course, it’s a media and customer education campaign, but it’s also pretty good advice. Particularly in Oklahoma, where our robust energy and agricultural sectors combined with an unusually strong housing market, have left banks in good shape.
Don Mecoy
Business Writer
Literary look at a financial collapse
An email arrived this week containing this timely remembrance from Thomas Wolfe’s “You Can’t Go Home Again.”
On October 24 [1929], in New York, in a marble-fronted building down in Wall Street, there was a sudden crash that was heard throughout the land. The dead and outworn husk of the America that had been had cracked and split right down the back, and the living, changing, suffering thing within–the real America…began now slowly to emerge. It came forth into the light of day, stunned, cramped, crippled by the bonds of its imprisonment, and for a long time it remained in a state of suspended animation, full of latent vitality, waiting, waiting patiently, for the next stage of its metamorphosis.
The leaders of the nation had fixed their gaze so long upon the illusions of a false prosperity that they had forgotten what America looked like. Now they saw it–saw its newness, its raw crudeness, and its strength–and turned their shuddering eyes away. ‘Give us back our well-worn husk,’ they said, ‘where we were so snug and comfortable.’ And then they tried word-magic. ‘Conditions are fundamentally sound,’ they said–by which they meant to reassure themselves that nothing now was really changed…
But they were wrong. They did not know that you can’t go home again. America had come to the end of something, and to the beginning of something else.
And:
The collapse of the Stock Market…was in some ways like the fall of a gigantic boulder into the still waters of a lake. The suddenness of it sent waves of desperate fear moving in ever-widening circles throughout America. Millions of people in the far-off hamlets, towns, and cities did not know what to make of it. Would its effects touch them? They hoped not. And the waters of the lake closed over the fallen boulder, and for a while most Americans went about their day’s work just as usual.
But the waves of fear had touched them, and life was not quite the same. Security was gone, and there was a sense of dread and ominous foreboding in the air.
Don Mecoy
Business Writer
