Re: New direction/recession?

[timework@xxxxxxxxx (Tom Walker)]

Yoshie asked:

>Beyond the tips, what other supply bottlenecks & infrastructure
>failures do you see or foresee?

It may be rash to extrapolate from local conditions, but the things that I'm
seeing developing here are skilled/qualified/experienced labour shortages
in, for example, public education, health care and trades. My sense is that
employers have played beggar-my-neighbour during too many years of NAIRU
policy-induced labour surplus and corporations have played
beggar-my-neighbour with public services. They are running out of neighbours
to beggar. Here in Canada, the inquest into the Walkerton water
contamination disaster are revealing the inevitable consequences of bleeding
public services -- the incompentent manager with too many responsibilities
faked test results and failed to read important faxes. People drank the
water, got sick and died. As they used to say about HTML -- it's not rocket
science.

Given the recent performance of of NASDAQ (or should it be called HALFDAQ?),
I doubt there will be much momentum left in stock option employee
compensation schemes, which means employers are going to have to either pay
for critical skills development up front or face disruptions in production
schedules. I think there's an uncanny mirror-image parallel between the way
that state owned enterprises in the former Soviet Bloc countries
systematically (mis)accounted for capital equipment depreciation and
inventory accumulation and the way that western accounting has
systematically misaccounted for labour costs by shifting social costs off
the private books.

Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island, BC