The U.S. housing market that has badly deteriorated in the past three years will stabilize this summer and the United States will be the first economy to rebound, Real Estate mogul Sam Zell said on Monday.

I think this is wishful thinking given the employment market will lead the stabilization and there are few signs of hiring or stabilization in layoffs.

Matt

Blodget: Last question.  You’ve been right in the middle of this meltdown day after day, interviewing the smartest people, etc.  So is this a new bull market, or is this another suckers’ rally?

Ratigan:  Suckers’ rally.  No question.  That’s not an indictment of the judgement of the market.  That’s just my perception of the ability of the banks to function in a timely fashion, the ability to create meaningful amounts of jobs in the immediate future, and the as-yet unrecognized meaningful losses to come in commercial real-estate and other asset classes…  We’ve gone through a transition where things were getting bad in a freefall, and now they’re just getting slowly worse.  So it’s a transition from jumping out a plane without a parachute, and now, after a year of free-fall, we’ve pulled the parachute, which feels a hell of a lot better than the freefall… I think we’re dealing with a problem that has a few years in it, not a few months.

This year marked our highest level of participants at 61.  Thanks for playing and good luck next year!

Thnx, Matt

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President’s Men and thinking: That’s journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It’s a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can’t repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can’t make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It’s as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn’t there a story here? Doesn’t journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren’t you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefitting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. “Housing-gate,” no doubt. Or “Fannie-gate.”

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled Do Facts Matter? “Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury.”

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was … the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was … the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It’s not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let’s follow the money … right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate’s campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an “adviser” to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama’s people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn’t listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That’s what you claim you do, when you accept people’s money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means. That’s how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards’s own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That’s where you are right now.

It’s not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation’s prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama’s door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe –and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You’re just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it’s time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a daily newspaper in our city.

I want to thank all those who support and protect our freedom here in America and internationally.  Without them I wouldn’t be able to have this great American life that remains so coveted around the world.

I’ll always remember that day and I hope you will to.  I continue to pray for those who lost loved ones on 9/11, the leaders who serve us and those who protect us.

  ~Matt

Hi All,

Happy Friday!

I wanted to send a sincere thank you and recommendation to Mitch Langstein. Mitch is the President of Cellular Accessories For Less in Redondo Beach, CA and is a true expert and leader in his field. His firm has outfitted all three of our offices and each one of my recruiter’s phone headset and cell phone accessory needs.

Please contact Cellular Accessories For Less for all your phone accessory needs.

Thnx,

Matt

 1. John Grisham. While this red-hot novelist is well known for being a lawyer prior to his writing career, what is less well known is the fact that his first degree was in Accounting from Mississippi State University. It wasn’t until later that he went to law school and watched a 12-year-old rape victim testify and inspire his first novel.

2. Kenny G. The famous soprano saxophone player graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Washington with a degree in accounting. Although he’d already been playing semi-professionally since high school, he wasn’t sure he’d make in the music world so accounting seemed like a much safer bet.

3. Bob Newhart. This funny man got his first job out of the army working as an accountant in downtown Chicago. He claims to have invented his own system for balancing the petty cash—when the drawer was short, he replaced any missing money from his own pocket. When his boss accused him of not using sound accounting practices, he decided to try something else. Ironically, it was while he was working as an accountant that he began doing his famous telephone routines.

4. Gibby Haynes. It might be hard to believe, but this outrageous lead singer of the hot punk band The Butthole Surfers went to Trinity University and earned his degree in accounting. In fact, he was captain of the basketball team, president of his fraternity, and was voted Accounting Student of the Year. After graduating, he worked for over a year at an accounting firm before starting the band.

5. Tim DuBois. You might not know this name right off the bat, but he’s known as The Singing Accountant. He’s written many a hit country song, including “Love In The First Degree”, “She Got the Goldmine, I Got The Shaft” and the Vince Gill hit “When I Call Your Name.” While currently the head of Arista Records, he taught accounting at Owen University for many years.

6. Walter Diemer. Another name you might not recognize, he worked as an accountant for the Fleer Corporation in the 1920’s. But in his spare time he tinkered with recipes until he invented a little something we know today as Bubble Gum.

7. J. P. Morgan. This famous financier and banker began his early career as an accountant on Wall Street. But after his father died and left him the family business, J.P. Morgan went on to become a banking and corporate pioneer. He began buying distressed businesses, in particular railroads, and merging them—a common business practice still today.

8. Walter L. Morgan. A name well known in the business world, Walter L. Morgan was a CPA—and is considered the father of the mutual fund industry. His fund—The Wellington Fund—became the flagship fund of the Vanguard Group, the second largest mutual fund company in the world. When he died in 2000 at the age of 102, he was the oldest living accountant and CPA.

9. Arthur Blank. Today best known for owning the Atlanta Falcons football team, he started his early career as an accountant. But he worked part-time in a hardware store and along with another employee went on to found Home Depot, the famous chain of hardware stores. This little company made him a billionaire—and his accounting know-how taught him how to spend it.

10. Josiah Wedgewood. Yes, that Wedgewood, the famous potter—he invented what we now call Cost Accounting. Thanks to a lucky combination of an embezzling clerk and a depression, Josiah was forced to come up with a system of tracking bottom line costs and profit. He used this system to determine the costs of his product, and was only one of hundreds of potters to survive the depression.

I wanted to share this moving video.  Please take some time to read the short story and watch the video afterwards.

Thnx - Matt Henry

“A son asked his father, ‘Dad, will you take part in a marathon with me?’ The father who, despite having a heart condition, says  ‘Yes’. They went on to complete the marathon together. Father and son went on to join
other marathons, the father always saying ‘Yes’ to his son’s request of going through the  race together.

One day, the son asked his father, ‘Dad, let’s join the Ironman together.’ To which, his father said ‘Yes’.
For those who don’t know, Ironman is the toughest triathlon ever. The race encompasses three endurance events of a 2.4 mile (3.86 kilometer) ocean swim, followed by a 112 mile (180 .2 kilometer) bike ride, and
ending with a 26.2 mile (42.195 kilometer) marathon along the coast of the Big Island.

Father and son went on to complete the race together.  (The son works at B.U. in the technology department.) ”

By VICKI SALEMI (Click here for original article)

If the enrollment numbers are any indication of its widespread appeal, crunching numbers is cool. According to the American Institute of CPA’s, more than 64,000 students graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting in the 2006-2007 school year, the largest number of accounting graduates in at least 36 years.

“Accounting is a very stable and well-anchored career path,” says Denny Reigle, director of academic and career development of the AICPA, a national professional association of CPAs with more than 350,000 CPA members.

Jody Queen-Hubert, executive director of co-op and career services at Pace University, adds, “Businesses always need accountants; the demand is there. Understanding how an organization manages its finances is critical to understanding how the business operates, and students need to cut their teeth in the trenches of an organization.”

Supply and Demand
“The issue is really this: accounting firms need more accountants than ever directly related to regulation,” says Karen A. Berger, Ph.D. associate dean and director of undergraduate programs at the Lubin School of Business at Pace University.

In fact, the already stable profession increased in demand thanks to the passage of the Sarbanes Oxley Act, also known as Sox. This legislation was passed in 2002 in order to reduce and eliminate abuses in financial reports, accounting and transactions and other activities that have damaged credibility in the field. For instance, CEOs and CFOs must sign statements confirming their review and judgments that the financial statements are accurate.

Recession-Proofing
Although strict regulatory requirements in effect for several years created an increased need for more accountants, the sizzle appeal right now may be attributed to the capricious financial industry.

Marjorie Platt, professor and head of the accounting department at the Northeastern University College of Business Administration, explains, “As Wall Street faces serious layoffs, quantitatively oriented students may decide to focus on accounting rather than finance. We’ve seen our number of majors continue to grow over that past year while the number of finance majors is flat or trending down a bit. Since the two subjects are highly related, it may not take a lot of extra effort or coursework to refocus one’s major.”

Rah-rah Recruitment
Another factor contributing to the appeal of accounting, says Queen-Hubert, is a focus on recruiting students on campus. “Accounting firms recruit heavily from college campuses and have been trying to jazz up their image. They have worked hard at trying to attract younger students with sophomore summer leadership programs, internships for juniors, and job offers before students hit their senior year. The image of a boring bean-counter is no longer what firms are projecting.”

As students meet recruiters on campus and learn more about opportunities they may also learn about the variety of paths to pursue. Reigle notes that once you earn your accounting degree, the sky’s the limit. “Within the accounting discipline, there are an increasing number of specialties such as personal financial planning and risk assessment.” Accounting for an adrenalin rush

Tracy Coenen, forensic accountant and author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud (Wiley, 2008), knows about one such specialty, “Fraud investigation sounds sexy, especially to the younger generation. It’s a bit of a twist on traditional accounting roles, which are often seen as boring. The idea of chasing down the bad guys sounds much more interesting than adding up a column of numbers.”

Forensic accountants typically put together a puzzle by piecing together a situation, reconstructing financial records, and following a trail of evidence. “Who knew I’d get an adrenaline rush from doing accounting work?”

Coenen steps into a client’s business to get a quick education as to how things work there and the suspicions of fraud. Next, she gathers data to help prove or disprove fraud, which is contrasted to the role of a traditional accountant who closes the books each month and reconciles accounts.

Many curriculums like Pace University include a forensic accounting class. Their forensic accounting course is a core requirement as part of the internal audit minor.

Full Speed Ahead
As enrollment reached at an all-time high over the past three decades, it seems the popularity of the accounting profession has no intentions of slowing down among students. Queen-Hubert attributes this to the financial crisis. “In today’s world and with the high price tag of a college degree, parents and students are looking for careers that offer long-term prospects and skills that can be portable amongst industries.” And right now, accounting seems to add up.