Tuesday, March 8, 2005

A Change of Pace

News story: Texas Instruments lowers guidance by $100,000,000 on slower-than-expected sales of chips to manufacturers of large-screen and plasma televisions because consumers are slower to buy than was expected.

I have composed a chart (mainly for myself) that attempts to show the repercussions of this fact. The Sol of this financial solar system is you, the consumer. You shed your life-giving energy (in the form of cold, hard cash) which reaches and sustains the planets that orbit you. Of course, each planet possesses gravity, and affects, to some extent, all the other members of the system.

Each planet also possesses satellites, in this case investors. All these planetary bodies depend upon you, the sun, to nurture them. If you were to cease emitting your life-giving rays, they would wither and die.

The paradox of this system is the fact that you may be not only the sun, but also, as an employee, a satellite of one of the planets. The planets must nurture you, the satellite, so that you, the sun, may in turn nurture them.

In reality, of course, planets do not nurture satellites, and we see that nowadays corporations are less and less inclined to offer benefits to their employees, in the name of competition (even though these same corporations are said to be flush with cash.)

As employees have less money to spend, corporations' profits are reduced, and so they cut back even more. Highly paid employees are laid off, forcing them to seek jobs that pay substantially less (it is a fact that employment in the manufacturing sector is dropping, while the low-paying services sector is increasing employment.)

Eventually, much of the population will have little money to spend on anything but the basics, forcing corporations to depend on the relatively small portion which possesses most of the money supply. Does this sound like a recipe for success, or does it sound like a disaster in the making? We'll see.

 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You forgot Planet Credit Card in your Solar System.  --Albert  (oh, my wit astounds me!)