A modest proposal to the board of directors at Merrill Lynch from a former (and onced RIFed) employee.

I’m interested in the quarterly corporate earnings announcements by Fortune 500 firms. It’s not because I’m much of an investor. When I was living in the U.S. the only time I would view much in the way of financial news on CNBC was at the end of a dreary session of channel surfing with the remote. Fifty seven channels and there’s nothing on, as the Boss sings. I was always amazed at the interest and high ratings that Jim Cramer’s extremely grating “Mad Money” investment program on that network garners. I figure that there must be some real good investment advice and hot stock tips coming out of that show to make his irritating Louis Ruckyeser on steroids shtick (with a bit of Pee Wee Herman like dementia thrown into the mix) worth enduring. Rather my interest is because at some point or another in my working life I’ve been at most of the Wall Street biggies, either as a consultant or perm. So that’s why I’m always all ears and eyes for financial news about: BNP Paribas, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Swiss Bank, DeutcheBank and Merrill Lynch. Merrill was the last one I worked at for 6 years until I was part of a 15,000 staff downsizing in 2003. The euphemism that management used then was “reduction in force” or RIF for short. The corporate world is averse to using the word firings or layoffs much in the same way that the funeral industry prefers “loved one” or “passed away” rather than just “dead”. Reduction in force sounds like some sort of smart military manoeuvre instead of just showing some teary employees the front door. Merrill Lynch in the past would have been most reluctant to fire employees and the firm once had the nickname, “Mother Merrill”. Actually I heard that term for the first time when an associate I knew in Municipal Bonds was fired after 20 years with the firm in early 2001. He was in shock when he announced to us that he was being separated from Mother Merrill and his anguish was palpable in the email message. Two years later when it was my turn there wasn’t much shock left; I never heard Mother Merrill mentioned by anyone. By that time Stan O’Neal had succeeded Dave Komansky as CEO and Chairman of the Board. O’Neil let everyone inside and out of Merrill know his dislike for that term and the corporate maternalism that it represented. In all fairness Stan O’Neal’s corporate governing style, as it relates to his underlings, is not much different than that of the other big captains of today’s industry who believe that there is no unspoken covenant with productive long term employees that guarantees them life time employment. I’ll spare the readers of this post any rants or diatribes against the cruel avarice of Corporate America. I certainly won’t go to any length here and relate how in the wake of the 9/11/01 attacks Merrill’s IT staff worked in an around the clock exhaustive effort for a month to keep systems and applications critical to the firm’s day to day operations running and how this extra work was made necessary by the firm’s pennywise and pound foolish decision in years past not to fund a business continuity plan. This is also not the time and place for me to say that when the dust settled a few weeks later how some of those same staffers started getting RIFed, just in time for the holidays. And I will not talk now about my experiences after leaving ML in trying to get my career back on track. If Steven King ever becomes bored with writing tales of horror beyond the grave and turning to the more macabre subject of trying to find work in America at middle age he should consult me for the basic research. No, my objective in recollecting all of this is in my expressed interest in returning to ML. The big business new today is that after presiding over the biggest quarterly loss in Merrill’s history and with many Wall St. analysts predicating that ML’s 4th quarter will be even worse, Mr O’Neil has himself been RIFed by the board and shown the front door of 4 Financial Center. In departing he will receive at least $159 million in severance along with 30 million in retirement benefits. Now that the board is looking for a new CEO I would like to propose myself as a candidate. Yes, I was just a systems guy at Merrill with no trading background. My answer is that Stan wasn’t a trader either. It’s true he was CFO for a time at Merrill and has some very impressive academic credentials. My argument is that I can do the same job of losing 2.5 billions of dollars even without a MBA from Harvard Business School. And I can do so for a lot less than the 40 million or so that he earned per annum at the helm. I’d be willing to take the job for the coolie wages of let’s say, 1 million and when my term is up, after loosing just a few million or so, I will take my golden parachute at the dirt cheap rate of 15 million. Plus Merrill doesn’t have to spend a lot in the search effort. I’m tan (it’s almost summer here in New Zealand), rested and ready.

Doing my own production systems support

I was reminded today of why I hate to troubleshoot my own computer problems. We have had a lot of issues with our TelstraClear ISP. Easy and relatively cheap broadband access is something I took for granted back in the States. And the U.S. isn't really given high marks for universal and relatively inexpensive high speed Internet access when ranked with South Korea and other Asia Pacific nations. But compared to New Zealand I think that the U.S. fares well. Here broadband is not as ubiquitous and low cost. When I first arrived in New Zealand in June I was surprised at the dearth of free hotspots and noted that this is not the place to go wardriving looking for unencrypted access points (not that I would ever think of doing such a thing myself). Now several months later I understand fully. I don't remember running up against bandwidth limits back in New Jersey or if my Cablevision contract included them but we have easily exceeded the 4 gigs monthly that we started out with in August. With a surcharge at $5.00 per 500 meg over it can get pretty dear.

The service has not been very robust to say the least. Lucy needs the internet especially for an on line nursing exam prep course that she signed up for 2 weeks ago. Our cable modem needs to be frequently power cycled; sometimes too many times to count in a single day. Today, Saturday was particularly vexatious. I couldn't get a connection this morning and tried multiple times to reset the modem, all to no avail. It was hard to raise a support tech through the voice mail system (some things don't change regardless of what hemisphere you're in) and when I finally did, after an interminable amount of time on hold, I was told that the modem looked good on his end. I had earlier tried to isolate the problem by taking my wireless Netgear router out of the picture. That didn't work. When I tried it again at his suggestion it did. I thanked him, finished the call and then tried to put the router back into my configuration but without luck. I did succeed with Cat 5 connecting one laptop to the router but it was strange that any wireless node I set up could see the router but not get out any further. After a few hours of this I finally got to the point where my wireless devices suddenly could make internet connections. I have no understanding of what the original problem was or how it could correct itself. Any insights would be greatly appreciated. I no longer do this type of stuff for a living, as I once did, and I'm glad for that. Still I'm uncomfortable with magic pixie dust solutions.

Red Rocks Beach

We went hiking on Sunday to the Red Rocks beach near Island Bay. This is a rugged and rock strewn beach where there’s a seal colony that takes up residency during the winter. When we got there it looked like all but two seals had checked out for the season. Actually most of the fun was in the long hike to get to the sea. We started our trip at the wind turbine on the top of a hill in Brooklyn (yes, it was named after that borough of New York City. There’s a park that separates Brooklyn from the rest of Wellington and of course it’s named Central Park. Many of the streets are named after U.S. Presidents. I haven’t determined if they have also have a restaurant named Junior’s that serves great cheesecake). The wind turbine is an experiment by one of the local energy providers to determine if wind power is cost effective and profitable. It’s hard to see how it could be anything but and I agree whole heartedly with the observation that Wellington could be the “Saudi Arabia of Wind”. We hiked with our new friends and fellow American ex-pats George, Susie, their son Wilson and a group of their Kiwi friends. We were blessed with perfect weather; a clear, cloudless day that reminded me of Southern California in the late Fall but without that brown ring of smog in the horizon. The trail we hiked was about 4 kilometres along a high and rugged ridge line that afforded expansive views of Wellington, the Pacific and the snow capped mountains of the South Island across the Cook Strait. I have more pictures at www.flickr.com. Keywords to search for are DannNewZealand2007 and the photo set is called Red Rocks Beach.

New Zealand Terror Training

The big news today was about the anti-terror raids that police launched yesterday at multiple locations throughout New Zealand including Wellington. 17 people were arrested and an arsenal of weapons including semi automatic weapons, napalm and Molotov cocktails was seized. The main focus of the operation was on what police allege were terror training camps in a remote section of the North Island. Police said that the arrested included environmental and Maori activists. Today supporters of those arrested claim that the terrorism charges are inflated and that the camps were being used to promote physical fitness.
This is the first time that New Zealand has invoked an anti-terrorism law that was enacted in 2002. New Zealand has not had terrorist acts committed within its soil as have Britain, Spain and the United States. To this writer it seems unusual to hear that a terrorist camp would include multiple groups with different causes. Besides the local media this story has been reported by Reuters and some of the British press including The Guardian. There’s no mention of this at all on the New York Times Asia/Pacific section of their world news web site.

The Haerbin, a missile destroyer and the first Chinese warship to visit New Zealand made a ports of call stop in Wellington harbour this weekend. Lucy, Bryan and I took advantage of a rare and rainless day and went on board Sunday when the ship was open to the public. There was an impressive array on board of missile and rocket launchers along with cannons and anti-aircraft guns. The main deck of the ship was open but all of the other decks and everywhere else on the vessel were closed to the public. I suppose they don’t want to show all of the high tech sophisticated gear that the ship is reported to have on board. Anyway we had a good time just enjoying the brilliant sunshine and seeing up close what all of those American dollars spent at Best Buy and Wal-Mart are helping to build.

Television

I’ve been thinking about television a great deal lately because now with our recently installed cable in our Wellington flat we have been watching a great deal of it. Sometimes it seems we came all the way across the Pacific so that we could watch the last episodes of “The Sopranos”. I have taken great pains in explaining to people here that that particular program captures some but not quite all of the essence of people in the great state of New Jersey. There is a lot of U.S. programming from premium channels like Showtime and HBO that is broadcast here uncensored on the regular broadcast stations but with commercial interruptions. Kiwis are much less uptight about the content of late night programs then many Americans. I can’t picture that they would have made quite the fuss over Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction a few years back during Super Bowl halftime. I like that but sadly television advertising is now pretty much the same through out the Western world. When I was a child I remember my father complaining about how television was geared to the lowest common denominator (his phrase). I was becoming an avid reader then but I dearly loved my “Twilight Zone” and “Rocky and Bullwinkle” and didn’t understand his complaint. Some four decades later I truly understand his thought. But it’s not just having an older persons perspective, television truly has changed for the worse in one important aspect. The elimination of U.S. government control on the amount of television advertising has made the medium almost unwatchable. And oh how that advertising has changed. Back then it was easier to ignore and tune out the ridiculous hard sell for “fast, fast relief” or the new and improved whatever. Now commercials have vastly improved production values and sophistication. They’ve benefited (for the advertisers) from all that psychological and focus group research in trying to make us buy. They’re hipper, smarter, louder, more visually spectacular and relentless in trying to get under the skin. Now in the interest of achieving “market efficiency” medical providers back in the U.S. have started running commercials to attract clients (no longer called patients as I’ve recently learned from my wife’s nursing text books) and these ads I find particularly wretched. They attempt to reach some warm spot in my heart with a first person narrative, usually telling me about some loved one with terminal cancer and how they are getting such wonderful end of life care from the hospital or hospice that’s being pitched. As Dorothy Parker once wrote in her review of “Winnie the Pooh”, “it makes me want to fwow up”. In New Zealand, with its national health service, I am mercilessly spared those ads. Unfortunately most of the television commercials here are distinguishable from the American kind only by the Kiwi accents of the actors and announcers. They are just as annoying and irritating.

Television programming for some time has been crafted to attract what is euphemistically called “young demographics”. But I question the usual explanation for the obsession that advertisers have for seeking the eyes and ears of younger viewers. The reason that advertisers are less interested in attracting aging baby boomer viewers is not so much because they are less open to changing brands or for trying new products. It is probably more to do with their learned cynicism in believing in the mantra that buying more stuff is fun and will help make you happy.

With the obvious exception of public broadcasting the main content of television is the advertising and the programming is really just filler. It’s ultimately a passive medium and we needn’t surrender so much of our waking hours to it. But first I must catch the finale to “Nip and Tuck”.

Oh the humanity! - More woe in the world of sports.

Sometimes the worst thing that can happen in politics or sport is to be the pre-ordained winner. It happened to Thomas Dewey in 1948, to my beloved 2007 New York Mets and now to the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team of 2007 who were eliminated from the Rugby World Cup in a quarterfinals match Sunday against France 20-18. The word everywhere in the rugby world was that this was going to be their year for winning the cup. Not being sufficiently rugby wise I accepted this as gospel and that victory would be a sure thing. Now Monday has been a day of much wailing and gnashing teeth. There is a lot of anger at Coach Graham Henry and calls for his sacking. Threats have been posted on websites calling for the head of the English referee for missing a forward pass (not allowed in rugby) by the French team that resulted in their scoring a critical try (like a touchdown – but 4 points). New Zealand has invested much of its national pride in the All Blacks. 1905, the year the team went on a northern hemisphere tour and lost only to Wales is considered a year of historical note in Michael King’s, History of New Zealand and this is also mentioned in official immigration guides on life in New Zealand. New Zealand last won the cup in 1989 and apparently has had victory snatched from them by Australia and the U.K. in World Cups since then. Those prior cup defeats constitute serious choking in the media and despite the build up of this year’s team there was much discussion of the ABs being lost in the wilderness all these past years. One sportswriter here in the New Zealand Dominion Post newspaper was sufficiently knowledgeable of American baseball and wrote a few weeks ago of the 86 year "curse of the Bambino" that afflicted the Boston Red Sox until 2004 and he mentioned a celebrated ailing Bosox fan who held on to life just until Boston defeated St. Louis to win the Series for the first time since 1918. Probably a better example would have been the Chicago Cubs who were swept in their series this past weekend with the Arizona Diamondbacks and failed to advance to the National League Championship series. Next year will be the 100th anniversary of the last time the benighted Cubs won the World Series. Kind of keeps the All Black’s World Cup losing streak in perspective.