The big push is on all over the country to legalize recreational marijuana. My gut reaction is that I am appalled, but I’ve been reading up on the topic to see if I am just an old fuddy-duddy teetotaler or if there is a good reason to oppose and fear it. It also has real ramifications in the machining industry with hiring decisions. Will drug testing for cannabis become obsolete or forbidden? Since Canada has legalized the sale of marijuana, as have states like Washington and Colorado, pot has become hot. Canadian pot companies like Tilray have gone public and…
Author: Lloyd Graff
I am not a big stock trader, but I have a portfolio of stocks in my IRA, which is a backstop for the volatility of the used machinery business. Or at least I used to think so. I know stocks go up and down. I know that when stocks go up a lot, I break up my day to check them. It is usually a reliable sell signal. When they are trending down and I don’t want to look, it is a reliable buy signal. Of course, being a sheep like most people, I rarely do that. I am in…
I’ve loved pro football since the days of Johnny Unitas. Dropback quarterbacks have dominated the game, but in recent years defense has become more prominent. Now the sport is swinging toward a more elusive running quarterback. With this swing, another interesting trend has been evolving. The quarterback position has become more “athletic,” and the players coming to dominate it are primarily young and African American. I’ve always regarded the National Football League as the most racist of the major sports. Yes, about 80% of the players are African American, but traditionally the quarterbacks have been White. The recent dust-up with…
It’s my birthday today as I write this, and I’m looking forward to a New Year. If you read the papers (I still read the sports page) you’d think the economy was sinking into a worldwide sewer, but if you look at the stats and feel the vibe around you in America you would have a totally different feeling. My gut feeling is that bankers and financial speculators (right at the bottom of my economic intelligence scale) are joining the herd in yelling that the sky is falling. Part of this lemmingness derives from the intelligentsia’s abhorrence of Donald Trump,…
Sometimes you can learn a lot from getting a haircut. I’ve been going to the same barbershop for 20 years. My needs are simple. Same hair style since I was 12. It’s a 15-minute trim. My old barber, Ed, died several years ago, and his employee Erin bought the shop. She inherited my head, I guess, and as a creature of habit I just continued the monthly routine. I rarely make appointments with her ahead of time, preferring to call her when I know I have a free half hour. She usually can fit me in on the day I…
I needed a football weekend badly. It had been a week of business travel, end-of-the-month tension, end-of-the-year push, and what I really wanted was to watch some competitive football on TV and forget about business. Wow, did I ever get what I was wishing for. First game I watched was Oklahoma versus Texas for the Big 12 Championship. I wanted to watch this game for one reason. “Who is this kid, Kyler Murray, playing quarterback for the Sooners?” He didn’t play last year because Baker Mayfield won the Heisman for them and became the Number 1 pick in the NFL…
We are at the 1/16 pole headed to the finish line of 2018. What does the news tell us about 2019 business? As usual it is a mixed-up picture – a patchwork mosaic of information and gut feel. GM announced yesterday that it is going to let go of 25% of its salaried employees. This is probably overdue for the still bloated Detroit company but, nevertheless, shocking for a company that is making loads of money now. But GM, like Ford, sees a changed new-car industry within 5-10 years and is shedding its pouch to prepare. Sales are down a…
I’m writing this blog to announce a slight shift in my business career, which has been evolving this year. Several longtime clients of Graff-Pinkert have asked me to help them find machining businesses to acquire and other owners have requested I find them a buyer for their businesses because they felt that I had the right network and skill set to do it. My initial inclination was that I’m purely a machinery dealer, not a business broker. But then I thought, why not try this. Perhaps I can add value for some people who I really care about. If I…
It’s November 6, and I’m sitting at Starbucks writing this piece, across from the polling place I chose not to vote at in 2018. For over 50 years I have voted at every opportunity. I’ve voted for Republicans, Democrats, Independents and Idiots. But this year I’m not going to be an idiot and participate in an exercise that does nothing positive for me or my community and wastes almost two hours of my precious day. In my America of 2018 the political system has evolved into a fat duopoly (a dual monopoly) of parties that vie for the spoils from…
The mavens and savants are struggling with lots of economic numbers coming in that do not conform to popular wisdom. We have a very tight labor market right now, but the wage increases are merely bubbling up at a 2% per year pace. I have to admit this number does surprise me because Amazon just raised everybody at least a buck an hour, and the minimum wage law, which used to be an issue for the angry liberals, is now a forgotten artifact in a competitive economy. People in the food-serving business do have to pay more or they will…