Tell It To Al

If you weren’t happy with your job in 1999, there’s a good chance you are never going to be happy.

So far, it seems 1999 was as good as it gets. Imagine no Internet bust, no wars, no banking crisis, no two-years of recession and counting, and no double digit unemployment.

In 1999, plenty of my colleagues decided it was better to work at home in their underwear for some obscure Internet site, than to come to work in a newsroom every day. Some even thought they’d be professional day traders and write novels on the side.

“In the late 1990s, the American economy was a job-producing marvel and opportunities for workers seemed endless,” said Rutgers University Prof. Carl Van Horn. “Only a decade later, with America suffering through its worse recession in nearly 40 years, workers have lost confidence about their jobs, prospects for retirement, and opportunities for the next generation.”

Van Horn is the co-director of a study released this week that shows Americans’ declining job satisfaction. You’d think satisfaction would have risen over the past two years, considering how many people would feel satisfied just to have a job. But no.

In 1999, only 59% said they were satisfied with their job, overall. That means 41% were not. What were these people thinking? That the Internet was going to employ everyone on the planet?

In 2009, only 49% reported overall job satisfaction. So now that the bubbles have popped we’re even less satisfied.

Click here to read the study. In all categories, satisfaction is down. Other findings of the survey:

Satisfied with retirement and pension: 1999: 34%; 2009: 24%
Satisfied with hours worked each week: 1999: 59%; 2009: 34%
Satisfied with annual income: 1999: 31%; 2009 22%
Satisfied with health and medical coverage: 1999: 43%; 2009,31%
Satisfied with tducational/training opportunities, 1999: 40%; 2009: 28%
Satisfied with security of your job: 1999: 59%; 2009: 41%
Satisfied with ability to balance work and family: 1999 51%; 2009: 40%

The Wells Fargo wagon is a’comin. Who is jumping on?

The offer: We’re going to sell more stock, so we can pay our government loans, so we can give our executives anything they want and pretend like a banking crisis never happened?

I’m not sure why anybody would bite on this pitch. But that’s essentially the deal Wells Fargo announced today.

Anything to keep that Obama guy from calling them “Fat Cats” again.

Click here to read more about Wells Fargo’s offer.

The bank is the last of the first eight banks that received money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program to come up with a plan to pay back the taxpayers. Wells Fargo got $25 billion.

It’s repayment plan involves shifting the risk from the taxpayers to the shareholders, which is a laudable free-market solution. But why would investors willingly line up for this? I know. The market is better now. But it’s not like there are all these sovereign wealth funds that need to choke on more bank stock.

Wells Fargo’s announcement follows Citigroup’s plan to sell stock to get out of government debt.

Wouldn’t it be nice if every troubled company could just sell more stock?

Can you believe Obama called bankers “Fat Cats”? And can you believe the bankers pretended to be offended by that? I talk about it live from my dining room on The Wall Street Journal’s widely watched online show, The News Hub.

Who says “I guarantee it” more often?

a) George Zimmer, CEO of The Men’s Wearhouse Inc.

b) U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Click here for the answer.

I just love this Tiger Woods quote that Rachel Beck of the Associated Press dug up:

“If you made that big a mistake, you got to come out and just be contrite, be honest, and just tell the public ‘I was wrong’. … I think waiting a long time got a lot of people polarized.”

Tiger said this in an interview with ESPN. He was talking about NFL star Michael Vick’s dog-fighting scandal. Not his own cat-fighting scandal. Click here to read Beck’s column.

Why does Al Gore have to be the face of global warming?

If George Bush won an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize for saying the planet was heating up and it was all people’s fault, would you believe it?

I ask this as someone who suspects the global warming scenario is true. Gore’s very presence in the debate has fueled skepticsm from the beginning.

In the aftermath of “Climategate,” Roger L. Simon, an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences member, thinks Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” is such cheap propoganda, that the Academy should rescind the Oscar that it won.

Click here to read my column on Simon, who has been heating up the blogosphere with this video (Click here for the full-lenghth version or sample the shorter one below.)

First we saved the bankers’ jobs. Now that unemployment has hit double digits and a mid-term election approaches, we should think about maybe saving some of the voters’ jobs. Huh?

Obama’s plan to spend found money in the Troubled Asset Relief Fund, which was set up to bailout banks, is going to hit heavy resistance from those who would like to reduce the federal deficit. When TARP was set up, language in the bill that crafted it said unspent money or returned money would go to reducing the national tab.

For those who buy the Keynesian notion that the government must save the economy and jobs during times of great stress, spending money on jobs and infrastructure has got to be a better way to go than bailing out the banks. I’m not a big fan of government spending on anything. But if we’re going to blow the national nest egg, maybe jobs should have been part of the equation from the beginning.

What? Moody’s is threatening to downgrade the USA’s Triple A debt rating? Isn’t this one of the agencies that put its blessing on all those toxic mortgage debt securities that brought our nation to this crisis point in the first place?

Click here to read all about it in The Wall Street Journal. I swear, Moody’s is starting to treat us like a nation of potential deadbeats.

Maybe someone ought to downgrade Moody’s, which lost a lot of credibility in the mortgage bust along the rest of the ratings agencies.

Maybe Moody’s ought to move to France or Canada or one of those other less-innovative, more socialist countries it finds more credit worthy.

If the good ol’ US of A isn’t Triple A, what’s going to be Triple A? GMAC? Freddie Mac? The Big Mac?

Moody’s is worried about the ratio of interest payments on the national debt as a percentage of government revenues. Lately, this ratio has been on the decline thanks to lower interest rates. But guess what happens to this ratio if interest rates go up because investors are suddenly worried about a downgrade from Moody’s? Yeah, thanks Moody’s.

The U.S., despite its problems, is a long way from any sort of default.

Still, despite some of the obvious absurdities of a Moody’s downgrade, someone in Washington should take notice.

We can’t keep running up the nation’s credit card bill forever. We can’t keep pretending we have a plan to fix the economy, when the primary plan anyone can see is a series of bailouts and an astonishing shift toward ever more government spending.

What if the downturn is longer than our political will or economic capacity to keep spending? Then what do we get?

Our leaders – on both side of the aisle – have actualy concluded we can spend our way back to prosperity. This strategy has worked in brief recessionary periods. Will it work in a protracted one? And if it doesn’t work. What then? What if the downturn is longer than our political will or economic capacity to keep spending? Then what do we get?

Maybe Moody’s isn’t in the mood to find out.

Signs the economy are improving are largely the result of trillions of dollars borrowed money injected into the system. I talk about it on Denver’s “Your Show” on My20 with anchor Adam Schrager. Also, click here for a recent analyis by the Associated Press.