Stocks, bonds, real estate; don’t count on it. The best investment for 2009 is people.

I wrote about hiring employees last year. Its a pretty damn good thing to do irregardless of the economy. The difference is today high quality workers are being shed along with the low quality ones. As Google restrains hiring and the investment banks continue layoffs, you can bet it is getting easier to find highly skilled and experienced technical workers.

Downward price pressures (deflationary for now) mean better for cheaper. Not growing your company? Then this is a great time to clean out the underperformers and replace them with new hires. You can keep your costs constrained while increasing company performance. Hell, one really good programmer can automate & replace the jobs of 10 lazy workers.

In the past few weeks I’ve seen some pretty impressive resumes. My standards and expectations have dramatically increased, and so should yours.

As for a follow up on my “Killer Investment with a 100% ROI” from May 2007, I would say my return has been substantially more than that. In retrospect, the idea of putting that money to work in any traditional investment would have been absolute lunacy.

Aaron Wall has a great post summarizing some of the recent problems in the advertising industry for publishers.

I saw this one coming, which was why I flipped my focus from selling inventory (as a publisher) to buying is (as an advertiser.) I guess I should change the name of this blog.

Many in the online advertising side have business models involving selling overpriced garbage to their customers. One of my friends recently dealt with a major US bank’s online advertising campaign. Every question he asked them — what sites are your ads being shown on, which banner ads convert the best — resulted in the answer, “we have no idea.”

Here is why you should pay attention as a publisher. If you think things are bad for you, they may be worse for ad networks and agencies you deal with. Aaron highlighted a story over at Techcrunch — “Glam blames the economy and extends payment terms from 60 or 90 to 120 days.” If I heard that from any company I dealt with, I’d assume they were at risk of going bankrupt and count on never being paid.

As I pointed out previously this is no time to close up shop. Most of the decline in ad inventory prices may be from advertisers ignoring their ROI. That means better and smarter deals on inventory for now. Are you a publisher? Great time to expand your community base through advertising. Running an ecommerce site relying on Google’s free traffic? Start learning the ins and outs of performance advertising.

Recently I have been hearing stories about people having big problems with their American Express accounts. No, not from flagrant spenders but from people who are capable, and at times do, pay their balances daily. A story today from the AP says that American Express wants $3.5 billion of bailout money, presumably to stay afloat.

To be fair to American Express these people do spend large amounts of money. Having more than a few red flags raised is completely expected. However, these individuals were asked to do basically impossible things to keep their accounts — despite American Express owing them money. That is right, in the process of trying to keep their accounts active (two specific and unique individuals in this case), they over paid their balances by very significant sums.

One party was able to keep their American Express account open after a great deal of work above and beyond what should be required. The story as I heard it was American Express basically said, we are kicking you out, and that individual proceeded to contact as many people as possible while faxing American Express literally every page of financial documents they had.

Based on that story, it leads me to suspect part of American Express’s problem is internal. A combination of layoff threats along with an ever increasing workload created by defaulting clients appears to have caused a precipitous drop off in American Express’s employee quality.

This paints a very grim picture for American Express’s future. Their high processing fees cost businesses money. Many will not accept AMEX if they don’t have to. At the same time, big spending limits along with excessive rewards motivate business owners to run all of their businesses expenses through their AMEX cards.

Would there be any rational reason for American Express to shed highly solvent customers right now? From what I see externally, my opinion is either it is a hell hole to work for right now or they are getting close to going under. May be both.