Did he say millions, or billions?

Perhaps it's jsut the way that I am looking at life now, but I find it incredibly interesting to watch the conference I'm working today.

Normally I had found these types of meetings incredibly boring, however, this time around I am simply tickled to see what everyone has to say.

Today I am working an investors/ bankers meeting for a global company. They are going over numbers from 2008 and what they are expecting in the first half of 2009. They continue to talk in millions, and even billions, of dollars dealing with profits and loss. All the investors have been asking about how they plan to recoup or deal with the losses as well as their strategy for surviving the economic crisis. These executives were basically presented like targets in front of the investors and bankers to be poked, prodded, and passive aggressively beaten with questions about the company and it's choices over the last year. The thing I found most interesting was the plan they had for reducing debt. The plan wasn't so much the most interesting part, but the fact that the plan would only reduce the debt by 2.5 million. This is from 17 million to 14.5 million, or so, and that's only if the plan works exactly how they plan it to.

There were 60 investor in this room. That's not even 100 k per investor this year, and that's if it's spread out eventually. AS WELL AS if the plan works!

It's obvious that all kinds of companies are in trouble in this climate. There is no better proof of this fact, perhaps ironically, that the Technical Director for this particular company's investors meeting is himself, on the dole...