First we have a new theme song – Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5, which has absolutely no relevance to anything but is fun. Secondly I think I’ve got the podcast to 2 segments instead of 4. Let’s hope.

Joe and I talked Scott Brown, SOTU address, budget, debt, debt and more debt, the Virginia’s legislative victory (democrat) which makes it illegal to mandate health insurance (thus sticking a fork in any hope for resurrecting health care) NASA, Nancy Pelosi and affirmative action.

Meanwhile, I have a new project with some friends called YOU TOO CONGRESS which you can see here. We are pre-launch while we work out the bugs, but feel free to poke around. Congress gives itself a lot of perks on our dime and excludes itself from a lot of obligations. Our goal is to point those things out, which should lead to voting them out.

One can hope.

In a bad economy there is a collection cycle.  We saw it in the dotcom bust in the late ’90’s.  I’m sure we will see it in this downturn as well.  There is a time in the beginning of a downturn when it is  relatively easy to collect debt.  Businesses make a concerted effort to pay off their obligations quickly so they can continue to do business.   In particular they pay obligations that are being collected by a law firm because they do not want to get sued.    With some exceptions, this is the cycle we are in today.

Over time, collections slow down.  People begin to ignore the agreements they  made, stop answering the phone and simply go quiet.  Generally this signals the last gasp of a debtor. Unless there is an uptick in the economy, the debtor’s money, and thus their ability to pay, runs out.

In the dotcom era,  the slide from collectable to non-collectable occurred about a year and a half in.  Companies dug out of  debt and then almost in concert, stopped.  At that point many companies simply went out of business.  We are not there yet, but unless the economy improves I  predict the same sort of slide, industry by industry over the next year.

Obviously the auto industry is in trouble, but we are still collecting in related industries.  If things do not improve quickly, I expect that trend to reverse in the near future,  and payments to slow significantly.  Unfortunately other industries can be expected to follow.

The obvious message is to collect what is owed to you now, before it is too late.