Tuesday, 16 September 2008

Credit Crisis, an alternative view







Very disappointing to see all those poor souls leaving Lehman Brothers yesterday with their stuff clutched in a cardboard box, but it raised a very serious question which doesn´t seem to have been addressed as yet.

Where do these cardboard boxes all come from?

I used to think that the IT department in a company were the first to know when a person or persons were about to be "liberated to pursue other interests". They are always ready to shut down access passwords etc., but now I realise that I am wrong.

The time taken to close a password and user information is seconds (unless you happen to work in my office, but that´s another story) however the time needed to get quotes for boxes, choose suppliers and get the things delivered.....well that´s another story. So now I know..they must be the first ones in the picture.

On the cardboard box note, it seems that paper companies could be a reasonable bet for anyone who still has a few dollars/euros/yuan to gamble with...oh sorry, invest. With conservative estimates running at 500,000 redundancies by the end of the year there will be a mini boom for the plant/bottle/stapler holders.
I noticed that Klabin the biggest Brazillian paper for packaging company is investing over a billion dollars in their new expansion, from 1.6million tonnes per year to a 2million tonne capacity, creating 250 new direct jobs...seems like someone got their 5 year plan right at least.

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