HARD 2 EXPLAIN

 "Fed and Treasury officials have identified the disease. It's called deleveraging, or the unwinding of debt. During the credit boom, financial institutions and American households took on too much debt. Between 2002 and 2006, household borrowing grew at an average annual rate of 11%, far outpacing overall economic growth. Borrowing by financial institutions grew by a 10% annualized rate. Now many of those borrowers can't pay back the loans, a problem that is exacerbated by the collapse in housing prices. They need to reduce their dependence on borrowed money, a painful and drawn-out process that can choke off credit and economic growth."

"This has been coming for a long, long time. For years Wall Street made record profits, many multiples of GDP growth and higher than other industries' profits. What they were doing is using heavy leverage, ignoring actual default risk, assuming that housing prices would always rise, and booking future profits in the present as income. Imagine if you could say 'well, I think I'll make 1 million over the next 10 years, so I'll just sell that money to investors now, pay them later, and book the sale price of 900K this year.' Works, till it doesn't."

"Monday will be a day of reckoning for the financial markets,' said Carlos Mendez, senior managing director of ICP Capital, a boutique investment firm in New York. On Sunday, he said, 'it was like a fire alarm went off and people ran in all directions."

"As economies slow, credit deterioration is widening and deepening, and as banks deleverage and rebuild capital, lending is beginning to be squeezed, restricting household spending and clouding the outlook for the real economy,"

...

The fund urged U.S. authorities to examine further the business model of Fannie and Freddie "when conditions stabilize."

I placed an order for Carvin SH575 back in March (3/14/08). It's running weeks late, but at least these video's give me something to tide me over till it shows up. The SH575 looks like it's going to be a great guitar.... Here' hoping!

So much for customer service and transparency in the operation. I think this amounts to, "We're taking along time to get the product out, so we're removing your ability to track progress and don't call us and ask either!". What do you think would happen if Federal Express or UPS turn off their package tracking and said "We'll call you if there is a problem!". Here is a snippet from the Carvin Blog:

"After careful consideration, Carvin has decided to remove the Guitar Traq feature from Carvin.com. Why? Due to the high volume of guitar and bass sales through Carvin’s Custom Shop, calls and e-mails asking why a particular instrument has not been started yet has affected the efficiency of our operation. Because of Carvin’s higher than normal volume of instrument sales, we are now quoting 10 weeks to build an instrument. It generally takes 4-6 weeks to complete an instrument, but due to the higher sales it is taking several weeks to start a particular instrument. This has concerned some customers who have placed custom orders and who have looked on-line to see that their guitar or bass has not moved in production. These factors led to the decision to discontinue Guitar Traq on-line."

I went to the Carvin.com BBS to discuss with other customers and to add insult to injury, the BBS admin posted the following notice:

"...and on a side note, the decision has been made, so there's no point in debating this. In order to ease this transition, the moderators have been instructed to delete any threads dealing with this decision."