What was to be a Volatile Stock Market

You know, over the last few years a lot of people have told me, "Welcome to Jack in the Box. Order when you're ready."  They've told me this because I believe in America and its businesses, and I support them and their efforts to provide jobs and make sure that our purveyance of  Monster Tacos remains the de facto global Monster Taco standard.

Jack in the Box has what we call a competitive advantage compared to foreign suppliers of Monster Tacos, because it has access to me as a consumer.  Because the Parisian based Jacques dans la Boite doesn't have access to my orders it can't grow it's receipts like the domestic Jack.

For years now the world has been watching China (really reading stories and reports about china; we haven't been sitting on lawn chairs in Mongolia and Burma (Yeah that's right, I went there!) with binoculars) with the understanding that it was going to transition from an industrial/export-based economy that relies on other countries buying its products to a service based economy that creates and satisfies much of its demand internally and that this would be a huge engine for growth and would be what would propel it to become the world's largest economy.

Over the last year a lot of investors have felt that the time for this was drawing near enough that they should start investing heavily in local Chinese firms that would have the best access to these growing sources of local demand. This contributed (along with some currency speculation which, let's not even get into this is complicated enough) to an increase in the valuation of publicly traded Chinese stocks of over 135% from last August to early June.  But then a few things happened, investors didn't see the growth they wanted, exports started to decline, and a lot of loans were not being paid back.  All of a sudden Beanie Babies and the loose floor board in the closet started to look pretty good to investors and they started selling their stock, and when others started to see the prices fall they started to sell their stock, and... well you've seen bugs bunny tumble down the mountain and become a huge snow ball.

China's government was adorable though, like kids who set up a lemonade stand but weren't getting any sales and whose parent's ended up buying most of the lemonade, China spent around $156 billion buying up stocks to stabilize the markets, but the stocks continued to fall.

All that said, this isn't as bad as it may sound.  Firstly, China's exposure to its stock market is a lot lower than most Western countries: it's not the same as our stock market experiencing the same drop.  China's property market is a lot more important and makes up about  25% of GDP and the property sales have been doing very well during these same months.  Secondly, the value of those stocks is still up 43% from the same time last year, so while a lot of the gains have been wiped out, the long term investors and prospects of the market itself are still positive in the wider view.

So I think the world will probably be fine, though the story is not over yet, we'll get a better idea of what the new normal looks like over the next few weeks, but I won't be writing about it, this stuff hurts my head.

The lesson for you, if you've made it this far, will be disappointingly familiar: markets everywhere go up and down.  Long term, diversified investment portfolios don't get you those 135% bumps in a year, but you also don't get those 75% drops.  Also, invest in tacos.  No one ever went wrong investing in tacos.

What was to be Life in America

A friend of mine ( I call him a friend, but really he's more of a giant than anything else and the laws of physical comedy almost demand that there be a emotional closeness between us as a counterweight to the physical variance) is getting ready to move to Hong Kong.  He'll be working a lot and I'm concerned that the comings and goings of American life will go unnoticed or unresearched by him, so I'm repurposing the blog to provide a one stop shop of the most important news in America.

I'm going to bury today's lead for a post with a more somber feel and move onto the b story of the ongoing fallout from the Ashely Madison hack.

Ashley Madison is a website on the internet in and around your computer.  The reasons you might visit that website includes at least two scenarios (1) you went to school with a girl named Ashley Madison, and now you are trying to see where she ended up and the BinGle engines sent you there (2) you married someone, but also you are kind of the worst and watch a lot of tv and think that just one or two affairs will have no long term repercussions other than the callouses on your hand from high-fiving all of your buddies.

Unfortunately, the premise is incorrect in both scenarios.  In scenario one, you should be looking for Ashely on facebook: she is married and living in Fort Collins.  In scenario two, you relied on anonymity after providing someone your name, address, and credit card and trusted them to take better care of that information than you took of your wedding vows.

Anyways, a group of hackers (computer scientists who use the internets and energy drinks to access other people's computer boxes without permission) retrieved the user information and let it run free on the internet.

As a newly minted journalist, I am covering this impartially so I'll reserve judgement on the morality of the hackers or the alleged cheaters.  But there are lessons in this story for those of us who fall outside of either group

Lesson the First: never do anything on the internet that you are not comfortable sharing with the entire world.  This may seem unfair, but fair has nothing to do with it.  I am just now coming to grips with the fact that one day my entire Netflix viewing history will be made public and everyone will know that I have tried no fewer than 5 separate times to watch Gilmore girls, but could never get more than 30 minutes into an episode. I encourage you all to try to get out in front of these eventual embarrassments.

Editor's Note: A car alarm is going off outside and has been for about 5 minutes now.  Ideally car alarms would have a time limit and if no one had come to see about the car in that time it would automatically unlock and start itself so the thief could remove the annoyance from everyone's ear shot. 

 Lesson the Second: I can't remember what this one was now.  That alarm drove it right out of my head.  I guess the lesson here is to make a note of what you want to write before tangentially writing a ridiculous editor's note.