Bill Huey, Strategic Communications, Atlanta (8/25):
Nice try, Sir Martin, but this is all hype, as was your appearance on CNBC this morning. Unemployment is officially 9.5 percent, and in reality much, MUCH higher. We're coming up on the two-year anniversary of the biggest legalized swindle in the history of the U.S. (AIG bailout and TARP), and it's hardly an anti-business environment when companies are sitting on three TRILLION in cash because of corporate welfare programs.
Stop trying to influence U.S. economic policy from your tax haven in Ireland, and stop trying to make chicken salad out of the other variety.
Ron Levy (8/25):
Here's a bright guy whose number of employees was down 8.7% from a year earlier, his clients are pretty unanimously uncertain about future prospects, there's fear that fiscal contagion from Greece, Spain and elsewhere will spread, he frets about the end of financial stimulus BUT he can't remember a speedier recovery in the past 25 years?
He reports what "helped power WPP to a 39 rise in first-half net income" (quoting here from the story) but that rise is just 2%--and is that "power"?
Laddies and ladies, methinks Sir Martin has gone south and kissed the stone!
You have to climb up to the second story of Blarney Casle to reach the stone, leaning way back to kiss it can feel perilous, and sure, Sir Martin isn't saying so but an 8.7% drop in employees from a year earlier can also feel perilous and should.
This is because even a year earlier, WPP was a frugal, well-managed company that hired VERY carefully, so some excellent people may be gone. And people are the main asset of a marketing conglomerate, not the furniture and glass partitions, not even the client list but the people.
This is the speediest recovery in 25 years?
Joe Honick, GMA International Ltd (8/25):
Excuse me! To what recovery does this person refer? Certainly not here. The continued disruption of the housing industry that has no discernible conclusion, sustained unemployment and now hundreds of thousands of returning veterans with little promise of anything....please do not let this guy get away with propaganda of a "speedier recovery." It ain't so.
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