Extreme Job Hunting

On his blog, Joshua Persky links to this breezily written Wall Street Journal article in which he is featured, Lessons of Extreme Job-Hunting. Below is a brief excerpt, followed by a comment by me and then a more pointed comment by a WSJ reader.

Joblessness transformed Joshua Persky, James A. Williamson III and Peggy Greco into experts about extreme job-hunting tactics.

Mr. Persky, an investment banker, handed out his résumé while wearing a sandwich board that read, "Experienced M.I.T. Grad for Hire." Mr. Williamson, fresh out of business school, taped his résumé inside the cab he began driving when he couldn't land a marketing post. Ms. Greco printed a T-shirt touting her availability for private-duty nursing, then wore it during bicycle rides around wealthy neighborhoods.

The unorthodox gambits failed these job seekers—but taught them plenty about finding work, and could provide a playbook for countless unemployed Americans. Mr. Persky learned to become a multi-faceted entrepreneur. Mr. Williamson discovered why personal networks matter. Ms. Greco recognized the importance of targeted marketing.

I've already censured myself for my previous commentary about Persky (See this post: "I have been too Harsh")¹, so I'll skip over his example. Regarding the Williamson fellow, the job he ends up with after his efforts is as an insurance agent. I'm surprised that a Wall Street Journal reporter doesn't know this, but those jobs are pretty easy to get. The initial training and stipend costs are usually a good investment for the insurance company for a simple reason: most applicants may not have the sales skills, persistence, and contacts to build a viable career as an insurance agent, but most will at least bring on some family and friends as clients before they give up. My guess is that the revenues generated by sales to those family and friends generally considerably outweigh the initial costs of the new hire.

A WSJ reader named T. Sawczyn weighed in in the comments:

Superficially obsequious and potentially self-serving compliments like the one from the recruiter above notwithstanding, I trust that the most important thing each of the profiled job-seekers has learned is the value of TARGETING their efforts to the need at hand.

I would think twice before hiring a personal nurse who rode a bicycle around "affluent neighborhoods" in a T-shirt that says "Hire me." Likewise, I question the intelligence or focus of an investment banker who thinks the best way to find a job is to wear a sandwich board. Finally, a taxi driver in a marketing job search is probably meant to be, a...taxi driver.

People, target your efforts and your job search to the correct audience. Network, direct your inquiries and make yourself a big fish in the small pond of your chosen specialty, not in the big lake of public exposure. This article and these efforts are further proof that what reigns in today's culture is narcissism and media exposure, no matter that the result of said self-exposure is nothing more than 30 seconds of fame.

Yes, none of these people was successful in their "job-search." Is anyone surprised?

¹I did also recently offer him the chance to bid on a small project I placed on Elance, but didn't hear back from him.

An Undiscovered Gem from Barron's?

Visiting Yahoo! Finance, I saw an article headline from Barron's that intrigued me, "The Best Bank You've Never Heard Of". I was hoping the article might be about some great micro cap bank I'd never heard of, but guessed it would be about a mid cap bank I already knew about, e.g., maybe Hudson City. I guessed wrong though: the bank was the mega cap multinational Santander. Is this is the sort of 'undiscovered gem' readers can expect from Barron's?

This article is my most recent reminder of why I don't read Barron's regularly. The second most recent reminder was this article back in May, which was listed under the "headlines" tab at the time for a stock I own, U.S. Energy Corp (USEG). At the time, this article wasn't available online, so I went to Barnes & Noble and looked for it in the dead tree edition of Barron's. Here was the one sentence that mentioned USEG,

Companies like Cameco (ticker: CCJ), BHP Billiton (BHP), Rio Tinto (RTP) and U.S. Energy (USEG) mine and/or trade uranium, although its value contribution to their shares is overshadowed by the many more popular metals these firms also trade.

Reading that, I thought: Is it too much to expect a Barron's writer to know at least as much about this company as me? U.S. Energy Corp. neither mines nor trades uranium, and, in fact, sold most of its uranium assets to Uranium One two years ago, as I have noted on this blog.

Barron's benefits from the inertia of its brand and of its readership. When I got out of college, I worked for a few months at a tiny, over-the-counter investment bank/brokerage in Manhattan where I was supposed to read Barron's every weekend. So I did. I'd read Alan Ableson's column, which was a little like Louis Rukeyser in print, and then I'd slog through the rest of it. I soon figured out that we weren't actually expected to learn anything useful from Barron's; we were supposed to read it because the affluent investors we were calling on read it, and they might mention something from the most recent issue and expect us to be familiar with it.

When journalists lament the decline of the print business, they ought to consider that the Google- and Craig's List-powered disruption of the advertising model isn't the only reason for print's decline; so is the decline of journalism itself. A lot of what passes for journalism today simply isn't worth paying for in any medium.

Peggy Noonan on Sarah Palin

From Noonan's Wall Street Journal column today ("A Farewell to Harms"):

Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths.

[...]

To wit, "I love her because she's so working-class."

[...]

What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.

[...]

"She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

"She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes." She shows your cynicism.

"Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues." Mrs. Palin's supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think "not thoughtful" is a working-class trope!

"The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

Noonan's mostly on-target here, I think, but it would be interesting to see some introspection from her on why so many in the Republican base might have embraced a candidate who hunts, fishes, lives in a rural area, etc. I'd expect a little more thought on this from a former Reagan speechwriter. The GOP has spent the last few decades mythologizing blue collar Americans in an attempt to woo them, going back at least as far as Reagan's "Morning in America" campaign, and continuing through the second Bush administration. We went from a plaid-shirted Reagan clearing brush on his ranch in California, to a plaid-shirted Bush clearing brush on his ranch in Texas. Noonan, of all people, shouldn't be surprised that when a candidate fits this image as well as Palin does, she will be popular among the base.

Noonan claims that Palin isn't working class because her father was a teacher and her mother was a school secretary, but this seems like splitting hairs. Okay, Palin's father didn't work in a coal mine. But neither was he the commander of the Pacific Fleet (as McCain's father was), or the CEO of an auto company (as Romney's father was), or the President of the United States (as Bush's father was). Palin may have her limitations, but she is savvy enough to run with her blue collar authenticity, such as it is, given how GOP image crafters such as Peggy Noonan have long made a fetish of it.

A.O. Scott on Sam Mendes

Sam Mendes (of "American Beauty" fame) apparently has a new movie out (one I have no intention of seeing), based on a story by Dave Eggers, about an expectant hipster couple's search for a place to raise their child: "Away We Go". In his review of "Away We Go" in Friday's New York Times, A.O. Scott calls Mendes out ("Practicing Virtue, and Proud of It").

Of Sam Mendes's protagonists, the hipster expectant parents Burt and Verona (played by Jon Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, pictured above) Scott writes,

Their conversation is carefully poised on the boundary between facetiousness and sincerity, and they do things like turn unlikely words into adjectives by adding the letter Y (Burt wants a “Huck Finn-y” life for their baby) and pretend to argue about the difference between cobbling and whittling.

To observe that they inhabit no recognizable American social reality is only to say that this is a film by Sam Mendes, a literary tourist from Britain who has missed the point every time he has crossed the ocean. The vague, secondhand ideas about the blight of the suburbs that sloshed around “American Beauty” and “Revolutionary Road” are now complemented by an equally incoherent set of notions about the open road, the pioneer spirit, the idealism of youth.

Or something. Really, “Away We Go” is about the flight from adulthood, from engagement, from responsibility, even as it cleverly disguises itself as a search for all those things. But the dream of being left alone in a world of your own making, far from anything sad or icky or difficult, is a child’s fantasy. Not an unattractive or uncommon one, it must be said, and for that reason it is tempting to follow Burt and Verona into the precious, hermetic paradise that awaits them at the end of the road. You know they will be happy there. But you should also understand that you are not welcome. Does it sound as if I hate this movie? Don’t be silly. But don’t be fooled. This movie does not like you.

The comment thread on the version of this article on the New York Times website even includes some comments backing up Scott on his review. Below are two of them.

Eggers doesn't work on the screen

The story is the same kind of innocents-in-the-storm tale that a much-younger Eggers became famous on back those many years ago. But this is a variation on a now-tired Eggers theme and Scott gets that completely - to use the language of the film, a hipstery, politically correcty, don't-want-to-grow-uppy couple who can too easily see the faults in everyone else and prescribes a cure that has an icy condescension within its professed simplicity. The story, like Eggers, is getting too old.

— Ed, Rhode Island

Watch an Apple-vs.-PC ad instead

You'll be watching the same plot: Young, hip, cool-o and pretentious triumphs over old, dysfunctional and clownish. And it won't cost you anything in cash or nearly as much in time.

A.O. Scott's review totally nailed it. In addition to the smugness and condescension I'd add affectation and treacle. Another example of filmmakers who seem to assume that all they have to do is anoint certain characters as "hip" or "offbeat," and use "edgy" colors and graphics in the posters, and the Angelika Film Center crowd will start lining up with open wallets.

But if you ask me, Eggers never worked on the page, either. Always makes me think of Tevye belting out a Mad magazine version of his Fiddler showstopper: "Pre-ten-tion!!"

— TMJ, Kent, CT

If only Peggy Noonan read this blog. She could take Scott's rejection of the Mendes/Eggers weltenschauung, combine it with some personal observations about Americans wading through the Great Recession, and throw in an anecdote from her Reagan years for contrast. Then she could let it all marinate for a few days, and microwave it just before the deadline for her weekly Wall Street Journal column.

The publicity photo of Jon Krasinski and Maya Rudolph accompanied Scott's review and is credited to François Duhamel/Focus Features.

The Economics of Blogging

A Wall Street Journal column last week by the Democratic Political consultant Mark Penn, "America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire", alleged that 452,000 Americans made their living by blogging. One professional blogger, Megan McCardle, explained on her Atlantic blog why this estimate was "addled" ("Blogging for Big Bucks"):

The estimates of professional bloggers seem wildly inflated--if you help update the company blog once a week as part of your marketing internship, you are not a paid professional blogger. And the numbers they themselves link to tell a much different tale from the article: most blogs bring in pitiful amounts of money for their owners.

This seems to follow the model of Mark Penn's book: find some bizarre number and mindlessly extrapolate it to an absurd conclusion. Yet I still don't understand why common sense did not keep him from publishing this article. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that almost all of us know many more computer programmers than professional bloggers--this is true of me even though I am a professional blogger, as are half my friends. Or he might have called some professional bloggers, who would have (sorrowfully) told him that no one is making $75K a year off of 100,000 pageviews a month, that being about how much traffic I pulled when I was starting up in 2002. Or, hell, he might have noticed that in the very BLS survey so nicely transformed into a table for his article, there is not entry for "blogger"--but that if you add up every writer, reporter, editor, PR person, technical writer, or "media and communications worker, other", there are only 499,890. Since Penn says that there are 452,000 paid bloggers, this implies that 9 out of every 10 communications workers are professional bloggers.

There may be one guy with some incredible niche--or moronic employer--making a ton of money with a modestely well-trafficked blog. But the plural of "anecdote" is not data.

Believe me, I'd love to think that blogging is a surefire path to riches and job security--but I'm afraid all most people get out of their blogs is the satisfaction of a job well done.

Coincidentally, a few days after reading Megan's post, I discovered the newest blog by Daniel Wahl, The Nearby Pen ("helps you live a happier and more productive life by sharing good art, reviewing good books, and explaining good thoughts") which included a post ("AdSense Pennies Make Dollars") that unintentionally supported Megan's point about the paucity of bloggers who make significant money from their blogs. In his post, Daniel mentioned the revenues he had generated from his three blogs over the last few months:

Not only will I not be making loads of money with Adsense, but at this stage of the game I should not expect to.

So why use Adsense? Quite simply, because--as the title suggests--pennies make dollars. Or to put it differently, a little bit of money adds up, even if little by little. And who knows, perhaps those pennies will grow faster with traffic at each site. In my view, it pays (at least a little) to learn more about how advertising on one's blog works while the blog is growing. I also think it is interesting. Here's the data for my first three months:

January...........4,291 page impressions...........$1.97 earned
February..........4,242 page impressions..........$3.62 earned
March.............4,411 page impressions..........$11.15 earned

This is no knock on Daniel -- I'm sure if I were using Google AdSense my ad revenues would be as low or lower (which is one reason why I never signed up for them) -- but it underlines Megan's point about why Mark Penn's estimates seem dubious. As for Daniel's point that pennies make dollars: sure, but time equals money, and, for most of us, there are much more remunerative uses of our time than blogging. So why do it? I mentioned one reason in my first post: to attract a few commenters I could get feedback from and bounce ideas off of. Another reason is the same reason most callers call talk radio stations, or letter writers write letters to the editor of newspapers: to express opinions. I have gotten a couple of ideas from writing this blog (or, more accurately, from observing the responses to a handful of posts), and one or two of those ideas could lead to a business opportunity down the road, so, in that sense, this blogging might end up being profitable as a form of brainstorming, but that remains to be seen.

Hussman Ties It All Together

In his latest market commentary ("On the Urgency of Restructuring Bank and Mortgage Debt, and of Abandoning Toxic Asset Purchases"), Dr. Hussman lucidly recaps his previous objections to the government's responses to the financial crisis and offers alternative solutions. On the issue of credit default swaps, Hussman writes that the government ought to,

[L]egislate a restriction on the use of credit default swaps (essentially insurance contracts against the failure of a company's bonds), requiring that such swaps may be used for bona-fide hedging purposes only. That is, a credit default swap could not be entered for purely speculative purposes, but only to offset the default risk of the same or similar bonds held by the investor.

This is similar to George Soros's recent comments on credit default swaps (e.g., in this Wall Street Journal op/ed last week, "One Way to Stop Bear Raids"), and it's consistent with the long-standing doctrine in the insurance business that only those with an "insurable interest" (i.e., something to lose if something bad happens to the insured) are allowed to take out insurance policies¹. This reduces the chance that a policy holder will try to deliberately damage the insured in order to collect on the insurance policy.

Hussman covers a lot more ground in this week's commentary, and his essay is worth reading in full.

¹In the early days of the insurance business, this doctrine wasn't in force, and it was possible to, for example, take out a life insurance policy on a complete stranger, despite the perverse incentives that would create.

Lula: "White People with Blue Eyes" Caused Financial Crisis

From today's Financial Times ("Brazil president blames white people for crisis"):

Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva yesterday blamed the global economic crisis on "white people with blue eyes" and said it was wrong that black and indigenous people should pay for white people's mistakes, writes Jonathan Wheatley .

Speaking in Brasília at a joint press conference with Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, Mr Lula da Silva told reporters: "This crisis was caused by the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing."

He added: "I do not know any black or indigenous bankers so I can only say [it is wrong] that this part of mankind which is victimised more than any other should pay for the crisis."

Lula ought to know about the victimization of black and indigenous people. After all, Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish black slavery, and as recently as five years ago, Brazil acknowledged that tens of thousands of its indigenous citizens were working as slave laborers. It's interesting that Lula says he doesn't know of any black or indigenous bankers though. Perhaps all the bankers in Brazil are white, but this isn't the case in the United States. We've had African Americans at the highest levels of the financial industry -- for example, Stan O'Neal as CEO of Merrill Lynch, and Don Parsons as a director (and soon to be chairman) of Citigroup. We've also had people of all races and backgrounds involved in originating toxic mortgages -- including Brazilians. In fact, two years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on a "mostly Brazilian ring that allegedly conspired to defraud people by persuading them to buy homes they couldn't afford" ("How the Subprime Mess Hit Poor Immigrant Groups"). Here's an excerpt from that article:

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- Naira Costa, a 27-year-old housekeeper, met her husband at Message of Peace, an evangelical church that is a spiritual and social haven for Brazilians in the Bay Area. When the couple considered buying a house a few years ago, the church's head deacon, Soario Santos, ministered to that need, too.

Mr. Santos, a fellow Brazilian, served the Pentecostal church on nights and weekends. During the day, he worked as a loan officer at a mortgage brokerage owned by a Brazilian immigrant. Mr. Santos and other church officers also working at the same real-estate business routinely approached churchgoers to encourage them to buy homes.

Weak credit and low wages weren't barriers, Ms. Costa recalls. "He told us that a house easily would appreciate $100,000 in a year," enabling the owner to refinance, says Ms. Costa. "We trusted him implicitly. Everyone at the church was buying houses from him."

Today, Ms. Costa and other former Message of Peace parishioners claim that Mr. Santos was a key part of a mostly Brazilian ring that allegedly conspired to defraud people by persuading them to buy homes they couldn't afford. Ms. Costa, the housekeeper, secured a $713,000 sub-prime mortgage. In another instance, a Brazilian baby sitter borrowed $495,000. Now, the home buyers are beset by foreclosures and additional stains on their already-tainted credit.

The graphic above, from a Knight-Ridder article on modern slavery in Brazil, comes from a website called Mongabay.com

Andy Kessler on the Fixing the Banks

From his op/ed column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, "Why Markets Dissed the Geithner Plan":

Mr. Geithner wants to "stress test" banks to see which are worth saving. The market already has. Despite over a trillion in assets, Citigroup is worth a meager $18 billion, Bank of America only $28 billion. The market has already figured out that the banks and their accountants haven't fessed up to bad loans and that their shareholders are toast.

[...]

Mr. Geithner should instead use his "stress test" and nationalize the dead banks via the FDIC -- but only for a day or so.

First, strip out all the toxic assets and put them into a holding tank inside the Treasury. Then inject $300 billion in fresh equity for both Citi and Bank of America. Create 10 billion new shares of each of the companies to replace the old ones. The book value of each share could be $30. Very quickly, a new board of directors should be created and a new management team hired. Here's the tricky part: Who owns the shares? Politics will kill a nationalized bank. So spin them out immediately.

Some $6 trillion in income taxes were paid by individuals in 2006, 2007 and 2008. On a pro-forma basis, send out those 10 billion shares of each bank to taxpayers. They paid for the recapitalization.

Each taxpayer would get about $100 worth of stock for each $1,000 of taxes paid. Of course, each taxpayer has the ability to sell these shares on the open market, maybe at $40, maybe $20, maybe $80. It depends on management, their vision, how much additional capital they are willing to raise, the dividend they declare, etc. Meanwhile, the toxic assets sitting inside the Treasury will have residual value and the proceeds from their eventual sale, I believe, will more than offset the capital injected. That would benefit all citizens, not the managements and shareholders who blew up the banking system in the first place.

"Citi's Taxpayer Parachute"

In an editorial today, the Wall Street Journal asks why Robert Rubin and other Citigroup directors still have jobs, "Citi's Taxpayer Parachute". Excerpt:

"Citi never sleeps," says the bank's advertising slogan. But its directors apparently do. While CEO Vikram Pandit can argue that many of Citi's problems were created before he arrived in 2007, most board members have no such excuse. Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin has served on the Citi board for a decade. For much of that time he was chairman of the executive committee, collecting tens of millions to massage the Beltway crowd, though apparently not for asking tough questions about risk management.

The writers at the Deal Journal blog remind us of one particularly egregious massaging, when Mr. Rubin tried to use political muscle to prop up Enron, a valued Citi client. Mr. Rubin asked a Treasury official to lean on credit-rating agencies to maintain a more positive rating than Enron deserved. What signal will President-elect Barack Obama send if his Administration, populated with Mr. Rubin's protégés, allows this uberfixer to continue flying hither and yon on the corporate jet while taxpayers foot the bill?