What I Want For Xmas

I figured I satisfy my ego by putting this out there, and just in case Santa is randomly surfing.

1. Creative Aurvana in-ear earphones

2. Mighty Minds Street Directory 2009

3. Muppets TV Series on DVD

4. Shoes (complicated because I need to replace my utilitarian black Docs and casual brown Hush Puppies)

5. Another set of long-sleeved shirt and trousers (also complicated because I am adding two units to the current business wear permutation and also because I am picky about colour and design)

Suprisingly or not, it was easy coming up with 1 and 2. The rest were tougher. Someone wanna psycho-analyse this?

There are bigger, existential, world-peace category items to wish for of course and I would trade these 5 and way more if Santa could fulfill those. But I am also a material human and had to get this out of the way and out of mind. And no one is too old to wish for presents.

Homemade Bling At Whimxical.com

I'm always supportive of folks who branch out into the entrepreneurial. I discovered that a colleague of mine makes bling, or technically, jewellery. And she sells her creations through whimxical.com. I ain't capable of assessing bling because I don't wear any (Don't Even Think About A Bling Present For Xmas!) (Think about a present, just not jewellery) (Thanks). The work looks pretty, and should appease many a bling wearer or gift giver.

The Average American Has $5,710 In Credit Card Debt

My first reaction to this was wah piang! That's a lot of money to owe a bank at 15-30% interest per annum. I did more research and it turns out that Obama doesn't need to panic that much.

The problem with statistics is the use and proliferation of the average. Averages are skewed by extremes. So if nine people make $100 and the tenth made $10,000, they made an average of $1,090. Not quite representative of the situation right? To the rescue is the statistic known as the median.

The US households that did have CC debt, the median amount owed was $1,900. Here's more comforting news:
- Only 29% of households owe $1,000 or more on their cards.
- 21% owe $2,000 or more.
- 6% owe $8,000 or more.
- 4% owe $10,500 or more.
- 1% owe $21,400 or more.

More not-so-bad news:
- 23.8% of American households have no credit cards at all - no bank cards, no retail cards, nothing.
- Another 31.2% of the households the Fed surveyed paid off their most recent credit card bills in full.
- So together, the households that owed nothing on credit cards equaled 55% of the total.

Woof. So remember stats aren't everything they seem to be.

Thank God I Have A Job

Bank of America out in the US announced today it's gonna cut 30,000 jobs over 3 years. Citibank announced last month that it was gonna shed 52,000 jobs. HSBC is dropping 1,100 people from its payroll. Nomura is saying goodbye to 1,000; Credit Suisse 5,300; JP Morgan 9,200. At home, we all know about DBS shedding 900 people and NOL 150 staff in heartless moves before Xmas and CNY.

That's about 100,000 people. Or Clementi New Town.

The big question is who's employing? And what are these people gonna do?

Here's the other thing. The employed folks are supposed to keep spending to keep the economy running. Well that's gonna make things interesting. Did you know people are actually putting cash into the US government debt system at ZERO return? Sort of like hiding cash under the mattress. That means people would rather get nothing for their savings than put any money with a bank, any bank.

Isn't it amazing the world's ended up this way? Haha.