Originally Posted by Bucking Bar (Post 1325189)

The concept I have a difficult time wrapping my head around is the effect of leverage, especially on the scale some of our bankers use it.

Dick Cheney famously said "deficits don't matter." Could he be right?

Lets say a guy takes 1 million from his savings and retirement and invests it in a business. He still shows $1 million, the business shows a million and with interest rates where they are at, might as well borrow a million (and the bank's deposits are just another guy's savings) ... so now my business has $2 million and I've got my million on paper too, for a total show of $3 million in assets. Magic, as long as you can make the payments. Now, we buy a couple million in houses from Courthouse foreclosure sales for around 50 cents on the dollar. If we can appraise them right 3 million becomes 6, and we can borrow against that equity. So, in this example the money supply has not increased, but by investing, there is a lot of cash floating around this little business.

That's leverage of 1 to 1, then 2 to one and finally 3 to 1. The average for banks is 9 to 1 and I think the investment banks got up to 34 to 1 in 2008.

When the liquidity ponzi schemes came cashing down, nearly all investors lost a lot of money. Where did that money go? It was in the money supply, but now it is gone. My business partner lost somewhere around 1.6 million total in 2008 and since his investments went to zero (Fannie, Freddie, GM Preferred stock, etc ...) he did not recover with the market. That cash is out of circulation.

My question is, do losses like his offset the increase in the money supply created by deficit spending?

Another question, what about when all this money is created ... can't we create much more money through leverage than the government ever dreamed of creating?

And, when our economy grows, don't we need more money? If you have a monopoly game with 1,000,000,000 players ... you are going to need more money than the game comes with .....

Originally Posted by DogWhisperer (Post 1325079)

Vacation bid question....Going to Philmount with my son this summer and would like to get two weeks in a row to cover the time...how do you fill it out for that....put week # and the 2 for the number of weeks requested? Then, do you follow it up with a CYA of just the one week # later...? Or, is it best to try and get the next week on a follow on secondary week bid? I'm sure that there is a gouge on the DALPA site but I am too lazy to go and look.

Originally Posted by Lifeisgood (Post 1325240)

Sailing, personally I love your posts, they never fail to pump me up, but here is a few numbers.


According to the ALPA’s bid monitor released on 4jan13:
Jan 2012 – Jan 2013:
10 guys came back from furlough
119 came back from the mil leaves
30 came back from sick leave

It is wonderful to see guys coming back, but with this “effective hiring”:
Number of Instructors (SLI) shrunk by 27.
Pilots required number shrunk by 138.
Total number of pilots has shrunk by 257.

Originally Posted by hockeypilot44 (Post 1325299)

How did 10 come back from furlough? I thought we had to be hiring for furloughs to come back.

Originally Posted by ExAF (Post 1325283)

Anyone have a recommendation for a place to stay near Times Square. Wife and I are going to "do NY" in Feb. Also...is the New York Pass worth it if planning to do the tourist things?

Originally Posted by 80ktsClamp (Post 1325354)

The word of the day in regards to the Feb or March AE via the February Crew Resources memo appears to be "overstaffed."

Bidding the 717 might be a pretty good deal for those who want the summer off!

edit- and look at how much lower feb 2013 international flying is than feb 2012... yikes! That's not capacity restraint, that's complete shrinkage.

Originally Posted by acl65pilot (Post 1325382)

How is that? Its a 365 day bid, and they will convert some right before they arrived, and with enough time to train them up and OE em. The rest will be converted at a rate of aircraft arrivals. With a 365 they have the time needed to make sure no one is sitting at home collecting 80 hrs and doing nothing.