Entrepreneur designs own bailout package
A. G. Newmyer said slapping the slogan “Too Big To Fail” on the front of a pair of men’s underpants was not meant to mock the government bailout packages extended to the financial and automotive sectors.
“I did not do it in any way related to making a political statement of any kind,” said Newmyer, a longtime Washington, D.C. political consultant, who conceived of his risque idea last Thanksgiving and founded Silly Underwear LLC shortly thereafter. “As all of the discussion about too big to fail started to mushroom during the recent economic tsunami, I just kept thinking about the expression and it just occurred to me as a whimsical idea to put it on a pair of underpants and see what happens.”
The underwear retails for $20 and is primarily sold online at SillyUnderwear.com. Newmyer’s story first appeared in a Wall Street Journal blog, after which he said sales increased dramatically. However Newmyer refrained from releasing any sales figures.
“It’s been very very busy,” he said, noting he already sold out of one size. “We certainly can’t afford to advertise so it’s all viral and word of mouth.”
The company recently released a campy promotional video on YouTube that features a young couple in bed, in which the male is fretting about his job security and his girlfriend tries to boost his confidence by giving him some “Too Big To Fail” underwear.
Newmyer even went so far as to send complimentary briefs to President Obama, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and economic adviser Larry Summers, but hasn’t heard back yet.
Despite the gimmicky nature of Silly Underwear, Newmyer is treating it as a real business that he said has a “very limited” downside and an “enormous” upside, as he only processes orders as they come in and doesn’t carry much in the way of inventory.
Small Talk: Parsing Geithner’s speech to small business
It appears the magic number for American small businesses is 10, as in the sudden urgency to help smaller companies after the U.S. unemployment rate jumped over 10 percent last month for the first time in a quarter century. After a year with Wall Street at the top of everyone’s agenda, Main Street is now taking center stage.
Suddenly new lending programs are being announced, town halls are hastily being arranged and political heavyweights from across the financial and ideological spectrums are falling over themselves to propose their plans for how to get small businesses back on track and hiring.
Over the past month, everyone from President Obama, to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and to billionaire investor Warren Buffett have addressed the issue. Yesterday was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s kick at the can (watch the video of his speech here), when he chaired a forum on small business financing with FDIC head Sheila Bair and SBA chief Karen Mills.
Geithner said the first part of the recovery was to stabilize Wall Street in order to prop up sagging earnings so investment portfolios stop taking such a beating and hard-hit firms stop laying off employees. “That rise in earnings is not simply because banks are particularly smart or clever,” insisted Geithner in front of an audience of small business owners and lenders.
Geithner added that now that the banking sector has been stabilized, the next step is to get banks lending again to small businesses, which he called “the engines of job growth” and which have historically led the country out of recessions. “It’s because the taxpayers of the United States and their elected representatives decided that to save the economy we had to act to stabilize the financial system. All banks – strong and weak – benefited from those actions and banks bear some responsibility for the extent of the damage caused by this crisis and they carry a substantial obligation to help our communities get back on their feet.”
CRISIS MANAGEMENT 101
Geithner went on to give a brief, but informative, lesson on credit crisis management, stating:
We are blaming Regan and Bush II only ?
The other side of the isle had no hand in this mess what so ever?
There is/was no other contributing factors?
President Obama is going to save the day?
Dose the name Obama make your leg tingle?
Small Talk: Jobs data contradictory
Over the last week there have been some wins and losses for small businesses in terms of new job data.
On the win side of the ledger, a new Intuit survey shows 44 percent of small businesses say they plan to hire in the next 12 months. The data is included in a San Francisco Chronicle story profiling a local Web startup – Airbnb.com – that is doing its part, having hired seven people since April, at a time when national unemployment has reached a 26-year high of 10.2 percent.
But that optimism is tempered by a USA Today story that said the main reason the unemployment rate jumped in October was due primarily to small businesses cutting staff. It seems that while some small companies are starting to hire again, they are still outnumbered by the ones laying off their workers. The story quotes Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, who explained there is a bias towards big companies in how the Labor Department compiles its payroll survey, which showed October job losses were down nearly 50 percent (190,000) from the average of 357,000 in May, June and July.
BANKRUPTCIES HURTING OBAMA EFFORTS
Small businesses are trimming staff, because many of them can’t get the loans they need to stay afloat until the economy picks up again. The Obama administration is ramping up efforts to get more money into the hands of small business owners, but the President’s efforts have been hamstrung by the bankruptcies of two of the country’s biggest small-businesses lenders: CIT and Advanta.
CIT lends to more than a million U.S. small businesses, while Advanta – a small business credit card lender – is trying to collect close to $3 billion in outstanding loans to 360,000 clients. The idea of both CIT and Advanta calling in markers has sent small businesses into a panic. The filings, which came just a week apart, may well be why Obama has chosen next week to stage a small business forum in Washington, in which U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Small Business Administration head Karen Mills will engage small business owners on the best way to get them more financing.
Sensing an opportunity, JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced yesterday it is stepping up lending to small businesses by $4 billion. A Reuters’ story suggested JPMorgan, which received $25 billion in public TARP money, could also be responding to government pressure to do its part to help get the small business economy back on its feet.
In 2002, there were approximately 23 million small businesses in the United States according to the US SBA (Small Business Administration).
The inscription’s on the wrong side. It needs to be on the back, closer to Wall Street’s commemorative body part.