Job Creation 101: Demand for Goods & Services = NEW JOBS!

Welcome to TishTrek - THE JOB BLOG:

Google Bloomberg.com for this NEWS! Our BRAND NEW JUMBO MORTGAGES for our Morgan Stanley Smith Barney clients & their interest in our 30 & 15 Year Fixed Rate Loans has created the demand for 30 NEW HIRES in our CHICAGO Office - Mortgage Advisors, Loan Officers, Processors, Underwriters, Closers - Our Team will hire you by
July 30th if you qualify!! Details of our SUPER CHICAGO CAREER DAY coming soon!

As you know, TishTrek - THE JOB BLOG is dedicated to every person in America looking for a job right now, so please listen carefully. My note above highlights a simple formula (Demand for Goods & Services = NEW JOBS!) & it succinctly tells the simple story about how jobs are created in this great nation. No company can pull a job out of a hat; few jobs are created with the sole commitment to help the unemployed; jobs don't exist or last very long if there is zero interest in the products, services, and market offerings a company is selling; and if there is no work to do, no customers to speak of and no business to tend to, there are no jobs.

This month ALONE, over 2 million fellow Americans will have exhausted 99 weeks of unemployment benefits. Let's face it, millions more fell off this public assistance long ago. Too many of you have given up and stopped looking for work altogether. Lots of you who are navigating through this tough reality have 10, 20, 30-plus years experience in your chosen fields and some of you (with the help of your parents from the Greatest Generation) did the hard work & made the tough choices & sacrifices it took to fund those additional educational credentials from Associate's degrees to BA's to BS's to MBA's to PhD's. I talk to lots of you daily and I know it's unbelievable to find yourself in this situation! Hang in there! You have to! Leaders are on the way to leverage your experiences of the past to propel the businesses of tomorrow forward!

For 24 years, I've commuted with scores of you who left your home in the suburbs of New York and New Jersey at 6:30 a.m. to trek to your jobs where you executed with excellence in the Tri-State region. Every night, you'd return home after 8 p.m. in what represented nothing short of remarkable hard fought efforts to deliver on the dreams of your families. Hang in there! You have to! Leaders are on the way to leverage your spectacular work ethic so they can propel the businesses of tomorrow forward!

I've lived in the trenches of EMPLOYMENT most of my adult life, so I can assert with confidence that the real unemployment number is not 9.7%, it's been over 17% for a while now. Ask yourself this: With all the remarkable talent in this great country & around the globe, can it really be possible that after two years there is no solution to create full time jobs that can get more fellow citizens back to work?

Increasing unemployment benefits from two months to two years will continue to force states to sharply increase unemployment-insurance rates; so NOW employers won't hire new workers because it’s becoming too expensive on this front too. Hello America, is anyone out there listening? All of the taxpayer bailouts, government assistance programs, unemployment benefit extensions and efforts from Washington, DC over the past two years have not helped the economy recover because there is no JOB CREATION.

The U.S. taxpayer bailout only succeeded at funding failure & killing jobs. Extended unemployment benefits are a job killer too. The money rewarded to these so-called ailing companies went to counter-parties and places we can't account for. It's impossible to imagine how many big bucks were distributed with reckless abandon when the money could have funded so many initiatives & projects which could have created DEMAND for Goods & Services and saved or created JOBS along the way. What happened to us? Let me explain what I saw:

Case Study #1 - When LEADERS reward poor performance & failure, you continue the cycle of poor performance & failure. One company handed billions of our tax dollars - earned partly off the backs of the unemployed - to counter-parties under contract (& made them 100% whole). Another, rewarded poor performing executives (in the form of "STAY" Bonuses) - to employees who either 1) Participated in creating the sub prime/ CDO disaster in the first place 2) Abandoned their risk responsibilities while on the job or 3) Were too incompetent to notice the looming financial disaster when it was staring back at them. To this day - many bonus beneficiaries still lack the experience, skills & competencies to save their companies at all. So OMGosh - If you don't believe good talent matters & that great leaders save corporations & jobs, you never will.

Case Study #2 - Without TRUST, BRANDS are destroyed. Make no mistake, everyone in the Wall Street counter-party & subprime CDO inner-circles knew these CDOs were garbage investments riddled with risks that could not be sustained. They knew competitors would fail when these clandestine transactions came to light in some market cycle down the pike, but they didn't care. How is it that this inner-circle could delay an economic recovery & job creation all in one quiet breath?

Because there can be no TRUST when there is statistically a 90% chance these people - many still under the radar - will repeat the same kind of behaviors that already made them rich off the backs of the companies they destroyed while eliminating the ability of co-workers to make a living. The decision to use the hard-earned money of taxpayers to reward such behavior is repulsive to many, but more importantly it has eliminated CONSUMER CONFIDENCE in those BRANDS tied to the circles who quietly insured their contrived CDO investments @ 100% with counter-party contracts while leaving all others assuming the risk and holding their empty bag.

Case Study #3 - How can you support people in a culture when their goal to empty wallets literally brought thriving global companies, the U.S. economy, and the global financial systems to their knees? Hundreds of thousands of citizens - who saved these companies with their tax dollars - lost their jobs, while cunning corporate players who failed all of us received millions of dollars in "guaranteed" bonus payouts arranged for them by them and executed with help from the various business/ functional leaders of their inner-circle.

Long before signs of the subprime meltdown could be recognized by even the most trained eye, complex legal employment contracts had already been lined up and signed which protected the massive payouts, cash flow and assets going to the executives who actually structured the CDO Market for failure. Only a few people we know in Washington, DC & at the NY Fed had the slightest clue of the staggering value tied to these contracts that amounted to financial promises that were air-tight & legally binding. Nice deal if you can get one, huh?

These payouts alone literally destroyed any chance for a quick economic recovery or job creation because too much taxpayer money had to be dedicated to rewarding failure. The only way out of this type of employment contract was to let these companies fail, but no one had the courage or enough information to suggest such an option @ the time.

We all know that investors would have swooped in and picked at the carcasses and/or saved giant segments of these companies had we auctioned them off in some kind of Fire Sale! Take AIG for instance: BEFORE the AIG Financial Products Unit (AIGFP) became the HORRID AIG BRAND & face-to-the-world that DESTROYED THE HOUSE THAT HANK BUILT (The Honorable Maurice "Hank" Greenberg's House that is!) - AIG had a stellar reputation & an 85 year history of enjoying worldwide DEMAND for & RESPECT of its high quality GOODS, SERVICES, and INSURANCE the world over. To fulfill that DEMAND, over 60,000 AIG JOBS were created! Poor C.V. Starr must be rolling in his grave!

I respect history and I assess skills and behaviors and talent for a living. It's my professional opinion that there would be so many more corporate heroes & many more people back to work, if the government had left more of these companies floundering in the supply-and-demand world that was positioned to save them. ALL the Wall Street companies would NOT have failed as we were led - like sheep - to believe. Since the beginning of time, real leaders & unknown giants - LIKE THE PEOPLE READING THIS BLOG - have arrived on the scene with talent waiting to be tapped AND they have risen up to help people & companies & countries & communities thrive while keeping strategies & big goals alive!

I recruit because I get to sit in awe every single time great talent brings powerful solutions to challenging situations! Every year we are reminded that when skills & competencies cannot scale to the enormity of a significant challenge inside a company, in a country, in the Gulf of Mexico, during a natural disaster, or on earth anywhere... there is a high probability that the mission will suffer and/or fail.

Those executives who failed all of us and whose reality was shaped & agreed upon by ONLY those benefiting in their inner circles - simply stopped acting in good faith for the greater good long before anyone noticed. Why else would AIGFP sell trillions of dollars of highly risky credit-default swaps (essentially unregulated insurance policies)on piles of worthless U.S. subprime mortgages right after NY Attorney General / Governor Want-a-Be / and Client #9 Eliot Spitzer ran AIG CEO Hank Greenberg out of AIG and New York City? You can't even make this up!

Despite these astonishing facts & disappointments, I'm begging you - the employment candidate / the job seeker - to believe that we can & will return to the core values which inspire hard work and innovation. After all, these are the same values that made Mr. Greenberg one of the greatest global leaders of our time. His leadership transformed CV Starr's Company into American International Group, Inc - an international beacon of light revered for offering important risk services and insurance products to people who needed them around the globe. Silently and without fanfare, he shared his success with employees, charities and communities the world over. When I worked for AIG in the late 90's, I executed special recruiting projects for Mr. Greenberg & his executive team and I understood the definition of leadership. Thanks to men like Hank - when I'm asked to recruit a leader, I know exactly what I'm looking for and the bar is high.

PS - Job Creation 101: DEMAND for GOODS & SERVICES = NEW JOBS! We can do it!


Best regards,
Tish