To Greed or Not To Greed

That is the question.


It has been a while since I have posted anything. Several people have expressed concern.

I suppose no news is good news but you still like to have news. My health situation has been pretty much the same for the last several months. After my realization in June of what "neutropenia" really means. If you have any doubts, here it is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutropenia . You can read about it but if you don't realize that a sustained ANC less than 500 can result in your death, you don't understand it.

After the episode in June, my Revlimid dose was reduced from 25 to 15 mg in an effort to sustain the anti-myeloma effects and increase my ANC. Tuesday, my ANC was 524, not good. I am told that after three weeks taking Revlimid, the one week off is to allow the white cell count to rebuild. In my case, my ANC stays in the 1000 range until I stop taking Revlimid then it plunges to the 500's and takes about two weeks to increase. I don't understand why it works the way it does because you would think my ANC would go from bad to worse when I start back on the drug but it actually works just the opposite. So, as long as this holds up, I suppose I will continue taking the drug. Maybe we will have to reduce the dose again.

TO GREED OR NOT TO GREED, THAT IS THE QUESTION. This seems appropriate these days not that anything has really changed, just surfaced. Different ones have been predicting a credit meltdown for ten years or so. The quantity of prognosticatorsators has increased over the last several years. The stock market crash of 1929 was caused in large part by people borrowing money to purchase stock (margin buying). This is referred to as "leverage" in the financial world. Well, HELLO! It is deja vu all over again with credit default swaps (CDS). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_default_swap

Greed always seems to be the other person's problem. I think we all want as much as we can get without breaking the law and some of us don't let a little thing like the law stop us. Ten dollars CASH? Dispose of the invoice. Tip yourself 28%. That's one way it is done.

A nation like ours that is couched in capitalism and the profit motive is always going to have a greed problem. I think it is incredible the amount of money some individuals who are CEO's and top executives of corporations extract from the corporation but apparently, that is what it takes. U.S. Senators and Congressmen are not far behind. Professional athletes may be ahead of all of them. And which one of us wouldn't trade places with any one of them in an instant if it were possible.

And the beat goes on. Banks aren't lending because they either don't have the money or they don't have the trust they will be paid back. It has gotten so bad banks don't trust banks. This is leading to companies coming up short because they don't have the retained earnings to sustain themselves and can't get a loan to bridge the gap. Companies are starting to fire employees as a means of getting cash.

Talk about a vicious circle which is what this situation has become. It started with greed. The owners of the means of production (manufacturing in the United States) over a period of ten years or so have shipped jobs and even complete factories and manufacturing equipment elsewhere (China ;) in search of cheaper labor in order to reduce cost thereby making more short term profit. Of course, the more jobs we lost, the more people who couldn't afford to buy new cars and pay mortgages. As houses were foreclosed on, the housing supply increased and housing prices decreased (supply and demand). Banks stopped lending because loans were in default. Companies couldn't get money to cover temporary shortfalls which lead to laying off workers. More workers can't afford new cars and mortgage payments. More loans default, more houses flood the market, house prices decline even more, etc., etc., etc.

My dad used to tell me that during the depression, real estate became almost worthless because there was almost no money available to buy anything. If you had a pig in a poke, you had something! Now this is probably the basis for all contemporary greed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_in_a_poke

In the past, the only thing that has stopped this downward spiral is government intervention. Leading economists maintained that the market would eventually correct itself, but we would all be dead by the time it got around to doing this. Let's hope the current efforts of the government will stop this downward spiral and things will start to turn around soon. What we really need is more poke inspectors :)