Have any of you often found a number of pennies in your pocket and nothing to do or spend it on. I have as well. While a penny had a lot of use back in the 1960′s and previous, they do not have a as strong of a benefical monitary value today.
Now I know you may have seen this already. Dan Pink beat me to the punch when he posted his thoughts in December of 2011. But I dare to bring you it again, an interesting argument for removing the penny from our daily lives. Except not me… I could use all the pennies you can spare!
With any change there are the naysayers and the hopeful that will cry for or against the change. However, no matter how painful a change may seem or uncertain the outlook…. change is inevitable. Get use to it and adjust! Unlike what some predict the world will not end… not until October 21st… “probably” but most likely or maybe 2012
I was once again a guest on the famous DriveThruHR daily a few weeks back (Aug 8, 2011). We had scheduled my appearance about 2 weeks before and how funny was it that on the Monday they asked me the question “What keeps you up at night?” that Standard and Poor’s had just announced the downgrade of United States from AAA to AA. Ahhh… well here we are; William Tincup, Bryan Wempen and I discussing Work, Business and the affects of the S&P downgrade. I am no economist but I am aware!
Enjoy and let me know what you think!
(A short commercial may run before the interview begins)
The U.S. Congress sets a federal budget every year in the trillions of dollars. Few people know how much money that is so we created a breakdown of federal spending in simple terms. Let’s put the 2011 federal budget into perspective:
U.S. income: $2,170,000,000,000
Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000
New debt: $1,650,000,000,000
National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
Recent budget cut: $38,500,000,000 (about 1 percent of the budget)
It helps to think about these numbers in terms that we can relate to. Let’s remove eight zeros from these numbers and pretend this is the household budget for the fictitious Jones family.
Total annual income for the Jones family: $21,700
Amount of money the Jones family spent: $38,200
Amount of new debt added to the credit card: $16,500
Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
Amount cut from the budget: $385
The S&P Downgrade – Background: AAA to AA+
Standard & Poor’s – AA – remember that this group also helped hurt the markets with their AAA ratings of the mortgage backed securities
The rating change is and should not be a surprise but there are 2 main reasons: (1) We spend more than we have coming in and (2) politics (It is clear that the rise of the Tea Party and the pledge of Republicans in general to never raise taxes, along with the Democrats unwillingness to cut Social Security, produced the downgrade)
We should not be worried but we should definitely become aware.
More than just an indicator of US politics, business practices and personal debt
So there will be two things we will need to focus on
Employee Motivation
Leadership Challenges (99% of the company looking for 12 people to decide)
Business (Leadership Challenges): China complained but is still buying US Treasuries. Why? Out of safe bets we are still the safest.
I am not an economist – China keep its currency value artificially low
One way they do this is by buying US treasuries
This low value of the Yen keeps their goods and services low and marketable globally
Being able to sell your goods globally at a much lower rate than other competitors keeps you more competitive.
This affects US companies in their ability to be and stay competitive
High Competition leads to the potential of Lower margins and possibly an increase in operating costs
This affects a business’s ability to maintain staff leading to the situation we are in now.
