Pettit Funds

Photo’s submitted to SLATE by its readers to document the recession:

CONGRESS PASSES WIDE-RANGING BILL EASING BANK LAWS
By STEPHEN LABATON
Published: Friday, November 5, 1999

Congress approved landmark legislation today that opens the door for a new era on Wall Street in which commercial banks, securities houses and insurers will find it easier and cheaper to enter one another’s businesses.

The measure, considered by many the most important banking legislation in 66 years, was approved in the Senate by a vote of 90 to 8 and in the House tonight by 362 to 57. The bill will now be sent to the president, who is expected to sign it, aides said. It would become one of the most significant achievements this year by the White House and the Republicans leading the 106th Congress.

”Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,” Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers said. ”This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.”

The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation’s financial system….[Rest of article]

Hey, the guy won the Nobel Prize in Economics this year. I read and loved his book THE CONSCIENCE OF A LIBERAL. We need him. Save us, Paul!

If you take a look at the rightmost column–that is the proposed TOP tax rate on those making more than $250,000 per year that the Obama administration proposes, and that New Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, et al, are screaming is “socialism” and “spreading the wealth”. Compare with the Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan years. Give me a break, Republicans!

Tip of the hat to this site.

Well, I had every intention of helping some struggling “Third Worlder”, but, as it turns out, my first experiment with obtaining freelance help online ended up being with a fellow American doing the work.

A year or so ago I read the highly recommended FOUR HOUR WORKWEEK, by Timothy Ferris. That was where I first really learned about and gave some thought to delegating tasks to folks more capable than I, but who will work cheaply.

I signed up–for free–at a site called eLance, but never followed through with posting any projects.

Meanwhile, over this last year I’ve been mulling over the idea of coming up with an Excel spreadsheet that could duplicate some screening features I used to use back when I was good at picking stocks–but that have not been available for the last couple of years from my current screen provider at Investools. As I’ve gotten poorer and poorer, I became more and more desperate for this “lost feature” and decided to bone up on Excel and its Web Query and Macro possibilities using Visual Basic. Well, it hurts my head just to even read that last sentence, let alone actually do the programming that would be necessary and so, over this last weekend I decided to farm the project out.

During my GOOGLING for Excel-related help, I had accidentally come across a freelance site called GetAFreeLancer. I looked around and saw that there were a number of capable Excel gurus in lands far, far away–so I did the free signup. I then posted my project last Friday evening (which I believe you can see here–although perhaps you have to sign up and login to see it, I don’t know; be sure and click on the “View Project Clarification Board” button to get a better understanding of what I was after).

The next morning I had a dozen or more bids in my mailbox, ranging from $30 to $150. I had expected to pay $50-$100 for the project and ended up going with a guy (American) who quoted me $50. (I think he lived to regret it, since it ended up being a little more complicated than he had expected. Hey, that’s business!)

Anyway, 24 hours later I had the worlds best Secret Spreadsheet for fine-tuning my future stockpicks.

And I am simply delighted!

I can’t wait to do something like this again, although I don’t know what that would be. All I know is if I was younger and still in the workforce I would be all over this stuff. If I was using Excel or any number of other programs in my work, I would be outsourcing the heck out of it.

Any future websites I put up will be done through a freelancer–for a lot less than past websites (including this one) have cost.

Take a few minutes to check out the above-referenced sites, just to see what’s out there. Bookkeepers are emailing tax information overseas to have math whizzes complete tax returns. Doctors are zapping xrays over to doctors far, far away who are able to interpret them overnight for less than a local radiologist would charge. People with excellent English skills are doing research and article writing.

Like it or not, the world is flat. We can complain about work going overseas, or…we can take advantage of it.

This was a terrific experience for me, and I hope you will all keep the possibilities in the backs of your minds.