Manifesto 2.0

1. I think that if a company goes out of business then the government should back them up only if it is truly needed. If our economy is not suffering when they go out of business then the government should not back them up because it is not needed to boost our economy. If the company goes out of business and our economy rapidly falls, then we should back them up so it won't hurt our country.
2. After looking at our 2011 budget, I think that we need to stop spending money on things that are not quite needed. It is difficult to boost our economy if we keep spending and printing money we don't need. We need to spend more money on our school system and less on our military.
3. I propose that in order to limit the national debt we must start drilling oil in our nation and stop printing more money. We also need to find small businesses and stop giving a bunch of bailouts to big corporations.

Dec.19th post

In 2024 the economy will be even worse than it is now. the debt will be rising even higher than before and we will never be able to pay it off. the housing will be very bad and everyone will have little money to spend. The president and the government will try and fix this but china and other countries will control most of our economy and our country.
People will have blue collared jobs and very few people will have white colored jobs because it will be hard to find enough money to save for college and get a well paying job so most people will have blue collared jobs. People will be driving around average or used cars and not very many people will have nice cars or nice things to spend their money on. QUESTION: WILL WE BE WEARING SPACE CLOTHES OR TIN FOIL IN THE YEAR 2024?

LEHMAN BROTHERS ESSAY SOURCES

My thesis is the very first sentence that is in my paper, sorry I forgot to highlight it and the last page connects the first sentence with the end.
Here are my sources:


1. Penn, Richard J. "Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc." Lehman Brothers. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Dec. 2012. 

2. Jr., John L. "Lehman Brothers." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 15 Dec. 2012. Web. 17 Dec. 2012. 

3. Keene, Tom. "Lehman Brothers." Bloomberg. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Dec. 2012. 

4. O'Brian, Dan. "Case Study: The Collapse of Lehman Brothers." Case Study: The Collapse of Lehman Brothers. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Dec. 2012. 
 5. Kroft, Anton M. "The Case against Lehman Brothers." CBSNews. CBS Interactive, 19 Aug. 2012. Web. 17 Dec. 2012.

LEHMAN BROTHERS ESSAY JUSTIN BROWN

Justin Brown

2A  

Lehman Brothers Paper   

What made the Lehman Brothers go bankrupt in 2008? There is more to the story that appears on newspaper articles and in books, this story has background, history, and family that all contribute and have a big influence on what happened. In 1844 a man by the name of Henry Lehman emigrated from Rimpar, Bavaria to the United States for a better lifestyle. He then settled down in Montgomery, Alabama. When he lived there he opened a dry goods store and named it “H Lehman”. Three years later Henry’s brother Emanuel Lehman moved to Alabama and they both decided to change the store name to “H. Lehman and Bro”, an when their youngest brother Mayer moved to the U.S and helped both of them out with the store, they changed the name to Lehman Brothers and a new era started to form. Back then tobacco and cotton were one of the most important agriculture crops in the U.S, and so the brothers decided to take cotton and trade their goods for cotton because they knew it would go up in value over time (commonly known as bartering). After a few years, their business grew and became a big part of their lives and a hefty source of income. After Henry’s death in 1855 caused by yellow fever, Emanuel and Mayer decided to focus on trading commodities and brokerage operations.  

By 1858, the cotton business shifted to New York City from the South and so Emanuel Lehman opened his first branch office in Manhattan and took control to run his business at the age of 32 years old. During the civil war in 1862, Lehman was facing a bit of a difficult time so he decided to team up with a cotton merchant named John Durr and later formed Lehman, Durr and Co. Years passed and the firm finally moved to New York City where they later started the New York Cotton Exchange in 1870. in 1883, Lehman became a member of the Coffee Exchange and finally the New York Stock Exchange in 1899; it was in that same year that Lehman purchased his first stock of the International Steam Pump Company. Even though that was not his main focus, his son, Philip Lehman teamed up with Goldman, Sachs, and Co. to bring the cigar companies in the economic mix. After doing that, Lehman decided to bring in Sears, Woolworth company, Gimbel Brothers Inc., R.H Macy and Company,  B.F. Goodrich Co. and much more bigger names.    

After Lehman’s Retirement, his son Bobbie Lehman took over as head of the firm. During Bobbie’s tenture, the company weathered the capital crisis of the Great Depression by focusing on venture capital while the market recovered. After Bobbie’s death at only 44 years old, he handed the business over to Pete Peterson. Under Pete’s leadership as CEO, Pete led the firm from significant operating losses to five years of record profits with a return on equity among the highest in the investment banking industry. As Lehman’s empire started to rise further and further, they decided to team up with Shearson and American Express; on May 11th, 1984 the combined firms  Shearson Lehman/American Express, and in 1988 Shearson Lehman/American Express merged with E.F. Hutton and C.o and became Shearson Lehman Hutton Inc.  

In 1983 to 1990 the CEO of the Shearson Lehman Brothers was Peter Cohen. He led a one billion dollar purchase of E.F Hutton and later formed Shearson Lehman Hutton. During this time period the company Shearson Lehman was busy building it’s leveraged finance  business to compete with their main competitor, Drexel Burnham Lambert. These two companies were always competing and always trying to stay one step in front of each other. During this period in time, Lehman was giving out several housing loans to many different people in the U.S and Lehman did not foresee or plan for the future if the housing market were to crash. Lehman had bought several properties for mortgages but when their prices dropped down, it went against the bank. This is what did happen and so the banks raised the interest rates on the housing loans which made the repayment of the loans quite difficult for the borrower’s. In the long run this was a huge blow to Lehman that caused a sixty billion dollar loss to the Lehman Brothers in real estate loans. This truly did hurt and effect the company and it was only going to get worse.  

In September, 2008, the president of the federal reserve bank of New York Timothy Geithner planned a meeting on the future of Lehman which involved an immediate liquidation of all it’s assets. Lehman wanted to go to Bank of America and Barclays for acquisition help but both banks, Bank of America and Barclays turned down the offer because they were not pleased with what Lehman did in the past. Lehman had failed to manage good relations with Bank of America and Barclays and along with some of the top banks in America. Lehman was stuck. The snowball effect started to become a nightmare for this company and when it was all said and done, Lehman had a total debt of over six hundred thirty nine billion dollars. Lehman had no choice but to file for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. The Lehman Brothers bankruptcy  is the largest bankruptcy in all of America, and economists say that because of this event, it played a major roll in our late 2000s global financial crisis. On September 20th, 2008, there was an agreement that was approved by the U.S Bankruptcy Court that gave Nomura Holdings permission to acquire the Lehman Brother’s Franchise in the Asia Pacific  region including Hong Kong, Japan, and Australia.  

This Event changed America and it is sad to see something like this happen to a huge organization. To think that it started with just three brothers that immigrated to the U.S from Bavaria starting their own dry goods store which then later transformed into a multi billion dollar company is unimaginable. It turns out that a well function business must start with good morals and true ethics in order to succeed. It is a shame that the housing market crashed and the debt started to pile up on them, I can relate to this because my dad is a realtor and his business was doing well from 2003-2007 and now it is much more challenging for him to do as well as he was doing due to the market crash; it’s a great time to buy a house on todays market but also a terrible time to sell. It truly is sad to see what happened to the Lehman Brothers but I guess that I learned that in order to manage a well profitable business, it comes down to honesty and trust. If you cannot trust your client or business partner then you cannot progress forward. Trust is key in the business world and it will help a person achieve their goals and make a promising future.  

Fiscal Cliff Blog Dec.3rd 2012

Basically the fiscal cliff is a system that started back when president bush was in office and he had it put into action in 2003. It was known as "bush tax cuts" and when Obama was elected he decided to extend it in the "job creation act of 2010". In late February 2012 the Chairman of the federal reserve (Ben Bernanke) popularized the term "fiscal cliff" for this situation.
Th house financial committee described the fiscal cliff as "A massive fiscal cliff of large spending cuts and tax increases" and it will take place on January 1st 2013 (29 days from today). The deficit is the difference between what the government takes in and and what it spends. They want to reduce it by half in the start of 2013.  The congressional budget office estimates the sudden reduction will lead to a recession in 2013 and will start to pick up after 2013.
So basically if this system does not get resolved soon enough and they find out a way that to not send us into a recession at the start of 2013 then everything will seem fine. If they don't figure out a solution soon enough in 29 days or less we the people could possibly be headed strait down that cliff and it would end up being another bad thing that happens in America. Hopefully they will resolve this problem so on December 31st people will not question if the sun will rise in 24 hours or less.

My Manifest

I think that the government should not be as involved in our economy as they are now becasue it could lead to a command economy and we learned that it is not the best way to control our economy. Taxes should be given to everyone and everyone should be able to pay them because if you do not feel obligated to pay them then you should leave. Taxes should be used in our military and  given back to large US companies and small businesses and also drilling oil on our land.  

The Government should not have control over our health care becasue it will reduce jobs in america  and in order to  grow  we need more US jobs to be successful. Also our taxes should be spent on education so our future children will know more than we will and they will be more successful.  

We need to spend lesson infrastructure and more on job creation and lowering unemployment. Aslo less money given to the emergency services and police officers 

Minimum Wage

I think that we should get rid of minimum wage. People that have businesses are willing to pay employees what they want to a certain point and I think that some minimum age jobs should get paid more and some should get paid less. for an example I think that my current job at postal connection, I should get paid less because I am not doing much work at all, I'm just getting paid to be there and help out the very few people that come in the door. I'm not saying that I want to get paid less but I would settle for maybe $6.50 an hour. Other jobs that have employees running around and always doing hard work I think that they should get paid more to at least $10.00 per hour because they are working harder vs me just sitting around doing hw and waiting for people to come in the door. Bottom line is I think that they should get rid of minimum wage and that the owner/manager must decide on how hard the job is and how much you can get paid.